One million giraffes

Giraffes? Giraffes! One million of them, to be precise...How many giraffes do you, personally, have? For most of our readers, we're going to guess that the answer to that probably lies between zero giraffes and, maybe, five giraffes. In any case, we're fairly sure that you won't have as many giraffes as Ola Helland.

That's because Helland, a web designer from Norway, is well on his way to completing his ambitious One Million Giraffes project - a website dedicated to getting readers to send him images of giraffes they have made, in the hope of hitting a million by 2011. At the time of writing, he's made it to 209,395 giraffes. (sept 9th)

The site was inspired, as all the best things are, by a bet with a friend - Ola's friend Jørgen didn't believe Ola's claim that the internet made collecting things so easy that a person could collect a million of just about anything., Ola insisted you could... and so the hunt was on for giraffes.

The only rules are that the giraffe images can't be created on a computer, they can't be giraffes purchased from a store, and photos of real-life giraffes don't count. So far, entries have included stick figure giraffes, paper models of giraffes, and pictures of giraffes drawn on people's feet.

Giraffes by country
This list shows how many giraffes I've gotten from the 94 countries that have participated in this project
53 744giraffes from Germany
52 429giraffes from Switzerland
48 422giraffes from United Kingdom
45 579giraffes from Norway
33 513giraffes from Lithuania
26 230giraffes from Israel
17 477giraffes from USA
13 281giraffes from the Netherlands
7 620giraffes from Austria
6 042giraffes from Luxembourg
3 225giraffes from Brazil
3 218giraffes from Poland
3 175giraffes from Northern Ireland
3 119giraffes from Australia
2 757giraffes from France
2 287giraffes from Belgium
1 864giraffes from New Zealand
1 617giraffes from Sweden
1 428giraffes from Spain
1 013giraffes from Canada
1 002giraffes from Finland
916giraffes from Italy
770giraffes from Russia
636giraffes from Czech Republic
620giraffes from Denmark
409giraffes from Latvia
358giraffes from Bulgaria
268giraffes from Ireland
225giraffes from Slovenia
190giraffes from Portugal
130giraffes from Turkey
114giraffes from Serbia
102giraffes from Isle Of Man
97giraffes from China
78giraffes from Ukraine
66giraffes from Romania
62giraffes from Mexico
60giraffes from Saudi Arabia
55giraffes from Republic of Korea
53giraffes from Hong Kong
52giraffes from Hungary
47giraffes from Scotland
42giraffes from Singapore
38giraffes from Malta
36giraffes from Ecuador
28giraffes from Iceland
27giraffes from Sudan
25giraffes from Argentina
25giraffes from South Africa
23giraffes from Wales
21giraffes from India
19giraffes from Indonesia
19giraffes from Slovakia
17giraffes from Kenya
15giraffes from Bermuda
15giraffes from Chile
14giraffes from Japan
12giraffes from Greece

And these countries have sent in ten giraffes or fewer:
Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Belarus, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Iran, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Namibia, Nepal, Nigeria, Palestine, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Taiwan, Tanzania, Tenerife, Thailand, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Venezuela and Vietnam.