[Wikipedia] May 10: The Million Dollar Homepage

The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by
21-year-old student Alex Tew from Wiltshire, England, to raise money
for his university education. The home page consists of a million
pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on
it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of
these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a
Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to which the images were linked, and a
slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of
the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a
million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has
commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.
Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon.
The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; as of 9 May
2009, it is 40,044. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put
up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning
bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross
income. During the January 2006 auction, the website was subject to a
distributed denial-of-service attack and ransom demand, which left it
inaccessible to visitors for a week while its security system was
upgraded. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wiltshire
Constabulary investigated the attack and attempted extortion.

Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage>

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Today's selected anniversaries:

1503:

Christopher Columbus and his crew became the first Europeans to visit
the Cayman Islands, naming them Las Tortugas after the numerous sea
turtles there.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayman_Islands>

1824:

The National Gallery in London, which today houses a collection of over
2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900, opened to the
public inside the former townhouse of the recently deceased art
collector John Julius Angerstein.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_%28London%29>

1857:

The Sepoy Rebellion broke out in colonial India, threatening the rule
of the British East India Company.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857>

1869:

The golden spike ceremony was held at Promontory Summit, Utah,
celebrating the completion of North America's First Transcontinental
Railroad between the Missouri and Sacramento Rivers.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/golden_spike>

1893:

For trade purposes under the Tariff Act of 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled in Nix v. Hedden that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden>

1924:

J. Edgar Hoover became the first director of the U.S. Federal Bureau
of Investigation.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover>

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Wiktionary's word of the day:

howbeit (adv):
(archaic) Be that as it may; nevertheless
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/howbeit>

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Wikiquote quote of the day:

We're one, but we're not the same

We get to carry each other, carry each other... one.
--Bono
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bono>

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