Five Years Ago Today

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpn0lWl6nn0

Back at the end of June, 2006, we put up tenthdimension.com and showed it to a few people. Initial response was generally very favorable, and we congratulated ourselves on a site that looked like it was going to do all right for itself. But we really had no idea what was about to happen!

On July 2 2006, the site got 2346 hits from 160 unique visitors, not too shabby. Then, some time later in the day on July 3rd, people started sharing the site with each other in a much bigger way, and we were thrilled to see a twelve-fold jump - 30,116 hits from 2,196 unique visitors. Cool! But by the end of the day, we were starting to learn about something known as the digg effect. So many people were trying to access our website simultaneously that some visitors were getting error messages, while others were having to wait minutes for the pages to load. Even with those delays, July 4th 2006 was an amazing day - 451,954 hits from 25,075 unique visitors.

With the support of users on digg and also on stumbleupon, the site saw over five million hits that first month, and that was from almost 282,000 unique visitors. Unbelievable! Five years later, where are we at?

Traffic continues to be steady to the main site, and stumbleupon and digg both continue to bring in new visitors.  By now the website tenthdimension.com has seen almost 100 million hits from almost seven million unique visitors! The video which drew so much attention to the project in the first place has been seen millions of times by viewers on revver, youtube, and numerous other streaming video websites, and my YouTube channel, "10thdim" currently features almost 400 videos created to help explore the ideas behind the project. That channel has also been quite popular, with well over five million upload views and we're now approaching 19,000 subscribers!

(On a side note, "Ice Age in 4D", created by College Humor as a satire of my project also continues to see lots of traffic, it's currently at almost 1.5 million views on YouTube, and of course would have seen many more views on the College Humor website.)

Regrettably, one change I made not long ago at the main site is that I was forced to close my website's forum to new members, as it was the target of so much daily spam (much of it offensive and pornographic) that I couldn't afford the time to keep cleaning it up. There are lots of other ways that people stay in touch with me though, not just through this blog and through my YouTube channel, but through my twitter feed ("10thdim") and my facebook page (rob.bryanton).

One thing I'm noticing lately at my main website is a lot more traffic from pearltrees.com,  which is a "social curation community". As they say on their site, "it's the place where you can organize, discover and share the stuff you like on the web." I was particularly taken with the metaphor they're using for how things are connected to each other because it reminds me of the animated opening we've created for my video blog. This project has been around for a while, but based upon the traffic I'm seeing from it, Pearltrees may be reaching some sort of critical mass right now. Here's a demo video that shows the concept:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjooxoNXx4

This graphic representation of interconnected memes also relates to some of the other sites like wefeelfine.org and Websites as Graphs, which we've talked about in past blog entries like Visualizations, and Mindwalk and Twitter. We also discussed memes as shapes that rise and fall over time most recently in the new video for Rebecca Black and QWOP.

So is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a meme that is still on the rise? In this blog, I've been tracking the slow move within mainstream science towards the ideas I've promoted with this project for the last five years. We've moved through the "Not Even Wrong" meme which sprang up about string theory a few months after my book was published, and we're mostly through the "there are really 11 dimensions" meme, as more and more physicists are stating nowadays that it's actually ten spatial dimensions plus one of time. Since my project is about using the logic of spatial dimensions to imagine all ten, and I've been insisting that time is not a dimension but a direction within the spatial dimensions, I'm glad to see the return to the discussion of ten dimensions within the mainstream. Over at my YouTube channel, if we don't include the versions of the original animation, here are the top ten videos based upon total views:

1. Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?
2. Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
3. Why is the Speed of Light the Limit?
4. Imagining the Omniverse
5. We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)
6. Secret Societies
7. Why Stop at Ten Dimensions?
8. The Holographic Universe
9. The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
10. Augmented Reality - 10thdim Music Videos

So let's close this entry by looking at the number one entry from this list: Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Pencil Visualization