In anticipation of this summer’s biggest blockbuster films, the world watched trailers for The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Risesover 100 million times. With all of the fanfare surrounding these superheros, we wondered who would win if they squared off against each other in a good old fashioned popularity contest. Would Gotham’s hero rise against the amazing webslinger? Would Peter Parker get the best of Bruce Wayne?
We found some really interesting data when we looked at global searches for “Spiderman” and “Batman” videos in the weeks leading up to each film’s box office debut. See the graphs below to discover which superhero was the most popular among fans.
Global searches for “Spiderman” (red) snuck ahead of “Batman” (blue) by just a bit when The Amazing Spider-Man hit theaters on July 3. But search interest in the caped crusader significantly overtook Spidey after The Dark Knight Rises premiered on the July 20.
India is the only country where “Spiderman” drew more search interest than “Batman” — and that’s likely due to Bollywood star Irrfan Khan’s role as Dr. Ratha.
So there it is – Batman wins over Spider-Man. But if the data doesn’t do it for you, here’s extremely rare footage of the two superheroes duking it out for all to see.
As infographics go, this one was pretty light. In fact, I almost skipped it completely until I saw an interesting fact that I had to share. Two-thirds of app users use them daily. While this might seem like a no-brainer to some, it’s hard to imagine using actual apps on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, that’s the information that is here and there’s no reason to doubt it.
This infographic from Instant App Wizard comes to us via Greensboro Ford and explores “The Progression of Mobile Apps”. Click to enlarge.
I don’t care if it’s untested. I don’t care if it appears unstable even when going slower than I can job. I don’t care that it’s bulky, ugly, and probably at least a little bit dangerous (even for a bike).
It has already had manned flights of up to 15ft at 50km/h, weaving through trees, buildings and under bridges. And these Mojave Desert test flights have been dominated by caution – not exploring the true limits of its capabilities.
Why do we wait for search engines like Google or Bing to crawl our sites? There are so many websites and blogs out there that we could easily get lost in the shuffle without the appropriate keywords to help them find us. You don’t need to wait, quickly and easily submit your sites to give them a heads up of your existence and possibly increase traffic.
How to submit your blog/website to Google
There is an easier way, all you have to do is go to Google’s webmaster tools and submit your website or blog’s URL to let them know that you exist, they will then check to see if your site is indexed and as long as you create quality content (not spam), especially unique content you will have a better chance of being indexed properly. Google’s webmaster tools will also let you know of any errors on your site, provide you with who is linking to your site, your most popular products and pages so you can hone in on increasing sales or page views that way too.
If you have been leaving the search engine Bing to the waste side since perhaps it is not your personal favorite, you should rethink the importance Bing plays on Facebook alone, it is their search engine of choice and if you are looking for traffic, any site associated with Facebook, which has over 900 million users, is a site you want your website or blog to show up on when someone goes searching for a topic your blog or website could provide the answer for.
Here too, you do not have to await Bing to find you, take the initiative and submit URLs for them to check out and see if you are showing up in their search results. This ability is located under their Key Resources and along with adding your URL and a captcha you are done, it really is that simple.
Submitting your URLs to search engines is how you can be found faster or found at all, take note of the day you submitted it and see if you begin noticing an incline in your sites traffic. You may be surprised.
What’s social media without names? Turns out, if you strip away the names and replace them with just colors, for example, you end up with a kind of pure egoless information that is, in many ways, more engaging than the original.
Uncertain Rainbow is a project from developer Chris McDowall that reformats your Twitter timeline, replacing everyone’s name and avatar with simple blocks of color. The result is still Twitter, but without any egos.
As McDowall writes: “You might be conversing with … anyone. A pure relationship of thought and humour… No pressure to duty-follow, or send a lame reply in response to a slightly-too-much @message.”
To check out Uncertain Rainbow, just head to the site, grant the app permission to access your Twitter timeline and behold the egoless rainbow.
Is your browser running on high octane? Image: Barbara L. Hanson/Flickr
The Google Chrome team has added a new set of JavaScript benchmarks to the web, dubbed “Octane“. Octane joins the ranks of other test suites like WebKit’s SunSpider test and Mozilla’s Kraken.
Google’s Stefano Cazzulani, Chrome Product Manager, writes on the Chromium blog that, despite a plethora of benchmarks on the web, Google wanted a new suite with “new benchmarks created from full, unaltered, well-known web applications and libraries.” The result, says the company, is a test suite that better reflects performance in “real web applications.”
Of course what constitutes “well-known web applications and libraries” is left to Google’s Chrome team to decide, and, perhaps not coincidentally, Chrome scores quite well on Octane’s hand-picked suite. That’s not to say that Chrome isn’t actually quite fast, but it does highlight the main problem with browser-maker benchmarks — the browser vendor creating them almost always seems to score the highest on them.
I ran the latest version of each of the major web browsers through Octane on a 2008 MacBook Pro (average of five runs each):
Safari 6: 6007
Chrome 21: 8517
Firefox 14: 5351
Opera 12: 3330
Internet Explorer 9: (tested in VMWare, but IE9 didn’t render the page.)
Mobile Safari (iPad 3): 553 (incomplete test, typed arrays aren’t supported in Mobile Safari).
Naturally the results will vary depending on your hardware, particularly your graphics card, but in all my tests Chrome won by a large margin.
To see the actual tests — which include a 2D physics engine, a 3D rendering engine culled from translated C++ along wit PDF.js and other libraries — head on over to Google Code where you’ll find the source for the entire suite. Also be sure to read through the FAQ for more info about the thinking behind Octane.
Amazon’s newest web service is custom-made for anyone paranoid about data backups, and now that you know Mat Honan’s I-was-hacked story, that’s everyone right?
Amazon Glacier, as the new service is known, stores a copy of your data in archived format for less than a penny per gigabyte per month. The only catch is that getting the data back out can take some time since Glacier is primarily intended for backup and long-term storage.
Unlike Amazon S3, which is designed for cheap but accessible file storage, Glacier is, as the name implies, playing the long, slow game. Glacier is intended for data you don’t need to get to often — database backups, images archives and the like. In the press release Amazon also says that Glacier data is intended to last, as in “centuries.”
Here’s how it works:
To store data in Glacier, you start by creating a named vault. You can have up to 1000 vaults per region in your AWS account. Once you have created the vault, you simply upload your data (an archive in Glacier terminology). Each archive can contain up to 40 Terabytes of data and you can use multipart uploading or AWS Import/Export to optimize the upload process. Glacier will encrypt your data using AES-256 and will store it durably in an immutable form.
While there’s an obvious use case for enterprise web services and any digital archiving project, Glacier could also be used as a cheap way to create an off-site backup of your files using something like Arq That would make Glacier not just a long-term storage partner for S3, but a competitor to backup services like CrashPlan or Backblaze.
[Update: Stefan Reitshamer, creator of Arq, tells Webmonkey that he's looking into adding support for Glacier to a future version of Arq. However, he also points out a couple of potential gotchas to using Glacier for personal backups, namely the possibility of very expensive transfer fees (see the discussion on Hacker News for more on this) and fees for deleting data less than 3 months old. It's also worth mentioning that Amazon's own blog notes that in some cases it may still be cheaper to use S3.]
Amazon also says that an S3-to-Glacier file moving tool for automated backups is in the works.
It’s important to note that getting your data out of Glacier is priced a bit differently than what you might be used to with S3. With Glacier you can retrieve up to 5 percent of your average monthly storage, pro-rated daily, for free each month. After that prices start at $0.01/GB. For full pricing details check out the Glacier pricing page.
