I don't think Nottingham University student Alex Tew will have any difficulty getting a job when he graduates. There's always one here if he wants it.

Faced with the prospect of a student debt of £30,000, he came up with the idea of selling a million pixels on his home page, for a dollar each. Of course, a pixel isn't much use to anyone, so the minimum purchase is 100 pixels, which can be used to advertise your website.

As the BBC notes, if he sells all his pixels, he'll have a lot more than he needs to buy textbooks. And it'll more than cover a few pairs of the expensive socks he wants. So he says he'll give some to his parents and invest the rest in a couple of interesting business ideas he's got up his sleeve.

Call me a sucker, but I'm off to buy myself some pixels. I don't think it'll help with our search engine rankings (too many outbound links on the page, with no relevance). I'm not even convinced that the sort of people that will click on my pixels will be the target audience for our consultancy services. But damn I love a good idea, and I'm only too pleased to support that kind of initiative.

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A few weeks old, this story, but I've been tied up with other projects. Anyway, a belated congratulations to www.payfinder.com for its survey which found that women still earn less than men in the UK, and that the gap is getting bigger. OK, it's not perhaps the most mind-blowingly original idea for a survey, but it was very professionally executed, and earned the site blanket print and broadcast media coverage (including every PR consultant's wet dream of a plug in the offline edition of Daily Mail).