Have you ever wished for a way to filter through all the crap on YouTube and find the music videos you’re craving in a world devoid of music television? (MTV is clearly no longer about the music, thanks guys).

Well, the makers of Tubalr want to help, and their service will make cutting through the nonsense, and getting to those sweet music videos by your favorite bands, a snap. Here’s a bit more about how it works:

Looking past the fact that Tubalr has a downright ridiculous name (is that supposed to be tubular? Tuba Lore? Two-baller? No idea), it’s quite great. You punch in an artist name, then pick either “only” (to play only that artist’s videos) or “similar” (to play videos from similar artists.) It queues up a big playlist, and you can go about your business as the tunes play on. Think Pandora’s concept, mashed up with Youtube’s music video archive.

I wonder if this will become popular enough to make stations like MTV reconsider their reality TV programming in favor of playing  music videos all the time like the good old days. Probably won’t happen while there is still money to be made off the Jersey Shore phenomenon, but a guy can dream can’t he?!

Link –via TechCrunch

If you can Google it, why bother remembering? Being able to access facts with just a few keystroke definitely improved our lives, but it has actually changed the way our memories work.

A study of 46 college students found lower rates of recall on newly-learned facts when students thought those facts were saved on a computer for later recovery.

If you think a fact is conveniently available online, then, you may be less apt to learn it.

As ominous as that sounds, however, study co-author and Columbia University psychologist Elizabeth Sparrow said it’s just another form of so-called transactive memory, exhibited by people working in groups in which facts and expertise are distributed.

“It’s very similar to how we use people in our lives,” said Sparrow. “The internet is really just an interface with a lot of other people.”

Like Einstein said, never memorize what you can look up: Link

The first of the features will enable users to search the web simply by speaking their requests. Called Voice Search, the speech-to-text application will be activated by clicking on a microphone icon located next to Google’s query box. Voice Search has already gone mobile as an App for Android phones, but Google wants to enable its users to search via speech recognition on their laptops and desktops as well. In addition to the convenience of not having to type, Voice Search will be a helping hand in those hard-to-spell searches. It’ll also be easier to, as Google puts it, enter “long queries, even really, really long queries, just by talking.” Initially, Voice Search will only be available on Chrome browsers, but they plan to make it compatible with other browsers in the future.

Link

Computer programmer Michael Yingling developed a search engine for archived Calvin & Hobbes comic strips. Here are some tips for using it:

Currently the search only looks for EXACT phrases (not case sensitive), so if you’re looking for a comic with the words “balloon” and “airplane” you cannot enter them both, or it will search for “balloon airplane” together. Perhaps in the future I will fix this, but it’s actually a lot more difficult than leaving it as-is.

There is one exception though! You can search for a DATE and it will find that specific comic, though it MUST be of the format MM/DD/YYYY. So 09/01/1986 will work, but “Sept 1st ’86″ and “9/1/86″ wont – yet.

Link via reddit

All of you Neatoramanauts know that we love tpyos here at Neatorama, but even we know how to spell Susan Boyle, MySpace and Swine Flu – those are just three of the most commonly misspelled (or perhaps mistyped) searches in Yahoo!

Vera H-C Chan of Yahoo! Buzz’ The Buzz Log has the list:

Recent Orthographic Abuses of the English Language on Yahoo!, Past 30 Days

* Swan Flu (for Swine Flu)
* Susan Boil (for "Britain’s Got Talent" contender Susan Boyle)
* Brack Obama (for U.S. President Barack Obama)
* Sonia Sotomeyer (for Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor)
* Rachel Ray (for Food Network host Rachael Ray)
* Paperview boxing (for cable programming pay-per-view boxing)
* Amtrack (for train system Amtrak)
* Wallmart (for retailer Wal-Mart)
* Farrah Faucet (for actress Farrah Fawcett)
* Rod Steward (for singer Rod Stewart)
* Arlene Specter (for Senator Arlen Specter)
* “Dancing With the Starts” (for ABC reality competition Dancing With the Stars)
* Bea Author” (for the late comedian Bea Arthur)
* Brittany Spears (for singer Britney Spears)
* Chris Allen (for “American Idol” winner Kris Allen)
* Configure worm (for computer virus Conficker worm)
* Mysapce (for MySpace)

Link – via USA Today

Previously on Neatorama: Swine Flu: Bacon’s Revenge

Since its debut a little over a week ago, I've been playing with Wolfram|Alpha. For those of you who don't know, it is an ambitious project by Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame).

Wolfram Alpha (I know, technically, it's Wolfram|Alpha, but I don't want to type in that vertical bar all the time) is not a search engine, in a sense that it returns webpages as query results like Google does - rather, it is a "computational knowledge engine." You and I may simply call it an "answer engine," ask it a question and it'll come up with the (usually right on the money) answer.

What is butter? Wolfie knows - it'll display the average nutrition facts. Ask it to convert $1 to British pounds, or the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who starred in Casablanca? How is the weather in New York on May 26, 1987? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Impressive, eh?

Now, Stephen is a very smart guy. Indeed, he wrote his first paper on particle physics at the tender age of 16, received a PhD from Caltech at 20, and became a professor there at 21. And to be fair, Wolfram Alpha is very young and heavily geared towards computations. Furthermore, the scope of what the engine "knows" in terms of content is limited to areas covered by trusted sources like reference libraries fed to it by its programmers.

But currently, there's one large gaping hole missing from Wolfram Alpha: it is blind to blogs. Sure it knows about the meaning of life, and it has its own blog, but it knows nothing - nada, zip, zilch - about the blogosphere.

Technorati? Maybe you meant technology instead. According to Wolfie, Gizmodo = komodo (the island, the language, or the movie - but strangely not the animal); Techcrunch = Techuchulco (a city in Mexico). Boing Boing = Boina (a volcano).

Ask it about Neatorama and Wolfie thinks that you mean Panorama (which I learned is actually a city in Greece, that, at the time of my query, has a warm 73°F weather with relative humidity of 50%, wind of 7 mph and few clouds).

At least this blog fared better than Lifehacker, which got "lumpsucker" instead.

Heck, ask what is a blog?, and it'll think you're asking about logarithms:

Still, overall, I think Wolfram Alpha is a brilliant first step towards (dare I say it) an artificial intelligence - a universal computer a la Isaac Asimov's fantastic short story The Last Question. And I'm sure the hardworking people over at Wolfram Research will rectify this oversight soon.

But whatever you do, don't get Wolfie mad. This is what you'll get.

If you don't stop, it'll probably shove you out the pod bay door ...

Twingly groups the blogs it follows by language – so if you don’t write in English, you can still find out how you rank against other blogs in the same language. Another interesting thing that Twingly has is BlogRank, which is sort of like Google PageRank, but for blogs.

Link – Thanks Anton Johansson!

Here are the highlights from Google searches from around the world in 2008:

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

I had to look up tuenti (a Madrid-based social networking website, referred to many as the "Spanish Facebook"), nasza klasa (a Polish social networking website), and wer kennt wen (ditto, this time for Germans).

Link – Thanks Justin!

Can you believe it, 2008 is almost over! Yahoo! Buzz takes a look back at 2008 (well, so far anyways) in terms of what people are most interested in searching.

Taking number 1 spot is Britney Spears (no surprise there, she’s been at the top search for both Yahoo! and Google for years). The list changed somewhat from the top searches of 2007, though besides Britney, four search terms remained constant (WWE, RuneScape – an online game, Jessica Alba, Naruto – a Japanese manga series, and Lindsay Lohan).

Take a look at the entire list: Link – Thanks Jason Khoury!