The Wolfram Demonstrations Challenge has run its course, and you have participated in droves. It's time to pick the winners. We do things our own way at Wolfram Research. We don't pull slips of paper from a hat or ping-pong balls from a barrel for prize drawings. We write Mathematica programs to tell us who the winners are. Of course. I wrote the program, but not wanting to expose myself to accusations of improperly influencing my laptop, I didn't run it myself. Stephen Wolfram did and sent me the results. And the winners are...

As a long-time developer at Wolfram Research, I can attest that the job requires superhuman discipline and self-control. Those who lack fortitude are soon undone by the irresistible functionality we build into Mathematica and spend their days exploring the esoteric topics they've always wondered about instead of building more great technology. The situation has recently gotten worse.

Today we are pleased to announce an exciting new phase in the development of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. In addition to its slick new design and structure, allowing for more intuitive navigation, the website now features a groundbreaking technology that takes interactivity on the web to a whole new level. This technology tightly integrates live computations into the web browser, making interaction with Demonstrations a fluent part of the online experience. Powered by a new web browser plugin, each Demonstration’s dynamic interface is now an element of the web page, similar to text, images, or videos, and yet is so much more than the typical inert content. Sliders, buttons, 3D graphic manipulations, color palettes, and the rest of the Wolfram interactive arsenal are now at your fingertips. They provide dynamic access to Mathematica’s universal engine spanning vast areas of pure and applied math, image processing, finance, control systems, wavelet analysis, and much more.

Last week we proudly celebrated the milestone of 5,000 Demonstrations. As each one is a separate program, this represents a huge collaborative software development. And now, every Demonstration has its preview animation available on YouTube. Each has a unique soundtrack created with variations on a custom WolframTones selection. Some facts and figures: over the last year, there have been nearly 14 million visits to all Demonstrations pages, with 3.5 million unique visitors to the main site. As stated in the previous blog post, Demonstrations have been viewed over 6 million times. Over 1 million notebooks have been downloaded using the Mathematica Player and over half a million source notebooks have been downloaded. Here are the top Demonstration topics:

Today we passed a remarkable milestone: the 5,000th Demonstration was published by the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, the free, interactive resource we created in 2007. This makes the Demonstrations Project the largest collection of open, instructional applets anywhere. And it's also much needed proof that you can create a viable and vibrant technical publishing ecosystem based on interactive applications rather than dead documents---pivotal to moving technical communication into a major new era. What's the significance of this?