For those not familiar with the expression, “blacklist” usually refers to Hollywood screen and television writers from the 1950’s McCarthy era who were thought to be communist sympathizers and were banned from working openly in the entertainment industry as a result. Not Hollywood’s finest hour.  My suspicion is that Google News has a similar list of writers it would prefer did not exist and these people (including me) are systematically excluded from having their work indexed and publicized.

Despite having given Google some of its earliest publicity in the form of the company’s first-ever TV interviews back in 1998, I’m told by friends inside the Googleplex that I have enemies in high places there, which I find flattering.

Google’s excuse for excluding me has always been that I am a sole proprietor of this operation and therefore what I produce doesn’t qualify as news. Tell that to the hundreds of companies I’ve been the first to find, the dozens of big stories I have been the first (and sometimes ONLY) reporter to cover, including a bunch of big stories about Google.

Nothing personal, it’s just the algorithm, they say.

We’re not evil, we’re just programmed that way.

Yeah, right.

When I was at PBS I pointed out to Google News that my URL was pbs.org/cringely, so I was really part of a larger operation that included news sources Google was indexing. If they indexed the NewsHour, I argued, then they had to index me. And so they eventually did — for a few weeks at a time. But I’d inevitably fall off the Google index again while some other bozo, often with a tenth or fewer readers than me, would stay on.

When I wasn’t being indexed by Google (which remains the case today) the only way my work would appear in Google News was when some other writer would cite me, which fortunately happens most weeks. Still, such second generation coverage doesn’t bring me any real traffic, I’m pretty sure.

Here’s how it would go down.  I’d fall off Google News, a PBS lawyer would write to Google and I’d eventually be back on for a few days until it started all over again. The times I wasn’t indexed lasted for weeks. And when I left PBS and arrived here, well that was it. Now I really was a one-man band.

So I was very excited a couple months ago when I began writing for AOL’s Housingwatch.com site, where I currently file 1-2 pieces per week on real estate and mortgages (here’s the short version: the mortgage industry is screwed, film at 11). With something like 30 professional writers working at Housingwatch alone, I knew Google would have no choice but to index my work.

Nope, I guessed wrong.

To my surprise it looks like none of the coverage at Housingwatch or its parent AOL is being indexed at all, which is stupid considering AOL serves 15+ million readers per day.

A week ago I wrote a short piece for Housingwatch that was picked-up by the AOL home page and given prominent play. As a result it got more than 750 reader comments over one weekend — a huge number.

If you want to figure how many people read a column from the number of comments, try multiplying by at least 1000. My posts here tend to average over 100 comments, which is pretty good.  But 750 comments, that’s spectacular.

Yet when that particular AOL column was burning-up the Internet I saw nothing about it on Google News. It was invisible.

How could that be? Most of the top stories on Google News weren’t getting 750,000+ readers, I was sure, yet they were being indexed.

My theory, then, is that both AOL and I are blacklisted from Google News.  That’s hundreds of  professional writers… invisible.

AOL is in many ways a Google competitor, I suppose. Certainly it is run by an ex-Googler, who probably left behind bad feelings.  But, if true, how fair is this on Google’s part? Not very. I don’t suppose it qualifies as evil, but it is definitely petty and in no way serves Google users, who should be appalled.

Well that’s the entire point: corporations, where T1‘s still dominate, use less bandwidth per person than we do at our house, where Dora the Explorer is our goddess and Netflix rules. So the pundits and analysts looked at this new Cisco router, the CRS-3, and saw it as either logical growth driven by Moore’s Law or logical growth driven by competition from Juniper Networks, or both. No changing the Internet forever, they wrote. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Except this time the pundits and analysts were probably wrong.

The CRS-3 is not for the Fortune 500 guys. Cisco has accepted that they can’t easily get big companies to expand the pipe and expand the router much beyond where they are today. HTTP just is too simple and clean. Cisco’s last stab at building enterprise bandwidth demand was telepresence, which needs a DS3 per node, but their Tandberg acquisition (telepresence lite) shows they are taking even that down-market.

So why the CRS-3?  The CRS-3 is for all the all-IP network of the future and as such is aimed primarily at telcos, not big business. The CRS-3 will enable the all-IP all the time future Internet as described just this week by the Federal Communications Commission:

– Video over IP

– Voice over IP

– TV over IP

– Radio over IP

– 3D over IP

– IP over IP

The difference with the CRS-3 is thinking globally. Why not watch a Russian TV station with subtitles or translations? Listen to music from anywhere, since it generally needs no translation. This is the new market for AT&T and global members of the Fortune 500. They get it; the market is not the USA, but the right demographic group globally. The CRS-3 is going to be the IP carrier to these demographic groups.

It’s a new kind of market segmentation that really makes sense when bits are what is being sold and those bits travel near the speed of light.

And, despite Cisco’s evident failure to explain itself well, the CRS-3 will change the Internet forever.

Here is his:

This is unacceptable.

We can log into Yahoo Mail.
We can read our email.
We can move or delete our email.
WE CANNOT SEND EMAIL.

When we try to send email, we are asked to enter a Captcha code.  We then receive a Yahoo error message stating the message was not sent. Due to spam problem sending has been disabled on our account.

The message goes on to say the problem should clear itself up in a couple hours, it usually takes a few days.

I’ve reported this exact problem at least 5 times in the past week.

Most of our PCs are running Windows XP with the latest versions if IE and Firefox, specifically Firefox 3.5.8.  Five of my family members’ email accounts are unable to send mail.  Two households on our street are having problems with their Yahoo accounts.  Other members of my family in other states are having problems with their accounts too.  The problem spans several states and several ISPs.

We have kids on trips.  Their travel arrangements are handled by email.  If email does not work, they can’t get their tickets.  My wife is looking for a new job,  but she can’t apply for jobs or respond to queries.  A coworker of mine was just laid off, I am trying to help him find a new job.  With an unreliable email system it makes things difficult — and it is hurting yet another family’s livelihood.

Yahoo! Mail Error Form (Error Code 15)

We are in the process of upgrading all of our Yahoo! Mail servers as part of our ongoing efforts to give you the best Mail service possible. There is no need to complete this form because we already know that you’ve received this error. It is temporary and should clear up within a couple of hours. If it persists, please do come back and let us know. Thanks!

What are you going to do about this, Yahoo?????

Anina has reinvented the magazine for your mobile phone.

Isn’t that what Apple is doing with the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch?

Not even close.

Anina, whom you may remember from her 2006 interview on NerdTV, has come up with a clever way to put magazines in your existing mobile phone. Her Mobile Magazines can be read on 2000 different mobile phone models.  If it has a color screen, your phone — however cheap it was to buy — can be an eReader.

Selling into an existing hardware base gives Mobile Magazines a huge advantage over fancy competitors like Apple or an Amazon.  Those companies have to first get people to buy their new hardware platform for hundreds of dollars before they can even hope to sell content for that platform, while Anina is sending content — color magazines with multiple pages, embedded links, and even e-commerce built-in — to the phone you already own.  And it doesn’t even have to be a smart phone, which is good, because 94 percent of mobile phones in use aren’t smart phones.

Mobile Magazines are the 94 percent solution, ready to go and ready to scale right now.

Apple, Amazon and Sony are playing catch-up to Anina but don’t yet know it.

If your web site or blog has an RSS feed, you can use it to automagically make a Mobile Magazine.  I made one for this blog in less than 10 minutes and it will keep publishing for free until I turn it off.  Adding more pages and active links costs some money but not much.  You can read my magazine on most any phone that can receive (not even send) SMS text messages.

You can read a Mobile Magazine where you don’t even have mobile phone service, like in a tunnel or on a plane!

If you have an iPhone  you can mount your magazine right on the desktop with your other apps, completely bypassing both iTunes and the App Store.

Use your phone to read the Mobile Magazine version of this column: http://mobilemags.360fashion.net/10703.

Or (again with your mobile) just click here:

Picky readers will say, “The screen is tiny, the content is hobbled, there is nothing to be excited about here.” But remember this same content can be read today on two billion devices throughout the world.

There will never, ever be two billion iPhones.

Non-U. S. companies are out. We’ve had a few Canadian companies enquire and one even claimed to be from Vancouver, WA instead of Vancouver, BC. No, that won’t do. This is a U. S. competition, but that doesn’t mean the next season won’t be international. In fact I can almost guarantee it will be.

Remember this is for TV as well as for the web so I might use a Canadian company or two as examples of how things are different for startups than in the U. S. but the 24 finalists will all be companies whose intergalactic headquarters are in the U. S.

While foreign startups are out of the running this time, companies based in Silicon Valley and other tech hotbeds definite are not disqualified.  I know this seems to go against the spirit of the competition, but I want the best startups I can find and if a few of those are San Jose or Boston that’s okay. My kids have never been to Boston.

Next, I’m sorry you don’t like the web site, but pouting doesn’t help, either, and it’s simply not attractive. We’re making changes to improve the site daily so let’s concentrate more on the potential of this competition and less on your personal disdain for certain kinds of javascript.

No multiple submissions! Before you nominate a company look to see if it is already there. And submitting in multiple categories won’t help, either, so stop it.

Now about those categories, I came up with the original six but there have been suggestions that maybe I’m being too strict, that perhaps there should be an education category and possibly one for finance. I am open to these changes, but only if there is real demand, so speak up in the comments section for this post.

Finally, there are some companies that want to nominate themselves but they are still in stealth mode and feel they dare not. Here’s what I suggest for you guys. if you believe your company is something really special and if you are fairly confident that you will be out of stealth mode six months from now (next September-October when the TV series starts to air) then contact me directly at bob@cringely.com and maybe we can still do something together.

I am willing to sign NDAs and will keep your grubby secrets until next fall. But you have to understand that each company I visit costs me about $20,000, so if you are going to change your mind about publicity next fall then let’s just forget it.

There’s always another startup.

It has been just over a day since we opened nominations for the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour and already there are more than 100 companies in the system, all six categories are covered, and the level of competition is very high. At this point I am confident we’ll get 500-600 companies in the eight week period, which is what I had hoped.

These things happen all the time in startups where emotions nearly always run high and the CEO (not me)  wins. That’s the case here, so life goes on. And, as I discovered after every previous firing, life tends to get better. It sure did in this case, because I have segued into working with one of my heroes.

I’m blogging with my friend Jerry Goodman, who writes under the name Adam Smith. Maybe you know the guy. He had a weekly show on PBS for 14 years (we are both refugees) and before that wrote three monster best-sellers that defined modern financial journalism — The Money Game, Supermoney, and Paper Money. My book Accidental Empires deliberately copied Jerry’s writing style as he likes to remind me.

Jerry also co-founded Institutional Investor magazine, New York magazine, and was Tom Wolfe’s editor at Esquire.  I am not worthy.

Jerry and I are blogging for a financial publisher called Asset International that caters almost exclusively to institutional investors so you probably haven’t heard of them. AI is run by Jim Casella, who was many years ago my boss’s boss’s boss at InfoWorld. He fired me there, too. But like other people have — including Steve Jobs and Stewart Alsop — Jim has hired me back, so I must have some value, however fleeting.

I’m the junior partner in this venture which is titled Adam Smith’s Moneyworld after Jerry’s old show. He hangs with titans of finance and lives to write about it while I do my usual, which is to explain complex systems. If you like such things and wonder how the world of money really works, please check us out.

Visit the new web site here, but please remember to come back and finish reading this column.

This new web site is strictly for readers to nominate startup companies, discuss them, vote for favorites, then see the results as we come up with the top 24 companies in six different categories.

You have to register in order to nominate or vote, though not to just read.  Many people won’t have to register if they login with their Facebook or Twitter IDs. Registration is important because that’s how we keep people from stuffing our ballot box. That’s the only reason we have registration. I won’t sell your name to anyone, I promise.

Notice that the site (unlike this one you are reading right now) doesn’t even have ads. I want to keep the new site completely transparent and above-board, because I think this might be one of the most important things I ever do in my career so I want to do it right.

As I am writing this, the new site stands empty. There are no nominated companies. That’s your job, not mine. So here is how to do your job. Click on the nomination form and fill it in for any startup company that you think is doing exciting work and deserves recognition. The very act of being considered and discussed by 500,000 readers will give these companies more publicity than most of them would otherwise ever get.  So in this case it is an honor just to be nominated. But having said that, please only nominate really good companies that actually qualify.

After my first column about the Tour I received e-mail from many startups wanting to be considered and one of those was Facebook. I have nothing against Facebook, but I hardly think it qualifies for this project. If the company you are pushing has zillions in the bank and more than, say, 50 employees, it is too darned big. No Facebooks.

Beyond that it is okay to nominate companies that have been around for awhile. It is okay to nominate your own company. This isn’t frigging Wikipedia.

You can add all kinds of supporting information to the nomination including documents and even videos for voters to consider. And remember that not only the nominator can submit such materials, any registered user of the site can do so. This requires registration because there are as my Mom, Mrs. Cringely, would say, assholes out there who will submit all sorts of useless or disruptive crap. This new site is a No-Asshole Zone, so let me know if you come across any nonsense and I’ll take the garbage out myself.

This is an ongoing process that will take at least eight weeks to find our 24 companies. Keep coming back to see the new companies that have been nominated and to discuss them and vote. While the winners won’t be final until the very end, I’ll make sure you have some sense of the deliberations as they go along, so come back for that, too.

Just to recap what I announced last month, my family and I will this summer saddle-up our 1996 Winnebago motor home to visit all 24 finalists, taking with us a TV camera crew. We’ll spend two days at every company, camped in the parking lot or in the CEO’s driveway. Two days is how long it usually takes for my kids to use up all the water and demand a trip to Redbox for new videos.

In addition to two months of ongoing text, audio, and video coverage right here, the 24 finalists will appear in my 12-hour reality TV series which will be on a BIG cable channel, one you have actually heard of that does not include the word “shopping” in its name.

I am also looking for a few good experts to consult on this project and for the TV series. That’s because I want to do more than just publicize the work of these new companies, I want to help them. So if you have been a successful startup CEO, CFO, CTO — anything with a C at the front — and are willing to share a bit of your expertise, please let me know. Experts on startup financing, including venture capitalists and angels, are especially encouraged to apply (bring money — preferably small bills with non-sequential serial numbers).

Some of these experts will come with me to the companies, some will appear only on video, depending on the time they can give to the project.

Not all experts will be accepted. This is my project and I’ll be the one to decide if you get to play or not. Frankly there are plenty of people out there who know a lot but have a hard time being helpful. We’re here to encourage. If any company made the top 24, they are already successful. We aren’t here to tell them how dumb they are and how smart we are.

All decisions are final.

Finally, I want to thank the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City for their support for this project, which they jumped on within minutes of hearing about it. Kauffman is the foundation of entrepreneurism and that’s what this startup tour is all about — helping to make America even greater.

But Kauffman and I can’t do it all by ourselves, so if your organization wants to become involved please get in touch with me because I’d like to make this tour an annual event and to help technology startups become as important to television as Survivor or The Apprentice.

Go to the new site and register now.

Apple’s preferred media architecture, HTML5, is the future of the web.

Web browsers have swallowed up most every app you used to have to install on your PC. Something like TurboTax needs forms to input data, display tables of numbers, and store your returns on their server. But if you want to have forms smart enough to know what’s a date and what’s a dollar; to draw piecharts; or store your W-2 on your laptop, then you need a new browser.

Flash always picked up where the browser left off, but it can’t talk to your webcam, store local files, or draw pixels directly to your screen. Now, for the first time, a cluster of technologies known as HTML5 allow a standards-based pathway to busting those barriers with canvas graphics, drawing video onscreen, smarter forms, and local storage for private data. So who needs Flash?

John Gruber is right: Flash is responsible for most of the crashes of my Mac. I can hardly blame Adobe for defending its very successful Flash franchise, though it feels strange coming from that nerdiest of nerdy companies. And I admit there are still a few things that Flash can do but HTML5 can’t, but the evolutionary path here is clear.

Where Flash a decade ago enabled browsers to do more, I can see a time coming soon when Flash will force browsers to do less than they might.

It’s time for a change.

When the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was organized by Bob Taylor in the early 1970s to revolutionize computer, network, and printing technology, there was a conscious decision to live 10 years in the future. The CSL would build devices that could be expected to make economic sense in 1980, not 1970.  This was a huge leap, because it meant the amount of memory in each device would be 64 times as much as made economic sense in 1970 when 1K was a lot.  Yet think of it, a 64K PC was the norm when IBM introduced that product in 1981 (base was 16K!) so the numbers were about right.  Only by embracing future limits, no matter the cost, was PARC able to achieve so much (Ethernet, Graphical User Interfaces, laser printing) in its first three years of operation.

Part of Google’s inspiration, then, for building-out a few residential and business optical networks is to do the same thing.  Because not all smart people work at Google and even more so because the smart people who do work at Google don’t generally think or operate like the rest of us, it will be very useful to see what normal folks actually do with that much bandwidth.

There will be a few surprises, I’m sure, but not many.  For the most part Google is hoping to inspire current ISPs — mainly cable companies — to follow its lead, like Tom Sawyer did when getting his friends to whitewash that fence.  Google wants to set an example for how to do local networks right and get the Obama Administration to codify that methodology through the Federal Communication Commission.  Then they want someone else to do the actual heavy lifting.

And it will probably work, not so much because Google is brilliant but because the cable TV companies are ambitious.  We’re entering an era where cable operators will have a real cost advantage over telcos in expanding residential bandwidth, thanks to DOCSIS 3.0 modems.

I’m the third DOCSIS 3.0 customer in Charleston, South Carolina and the first residential customer following two law firms.  I did it I suppose to write this column but even more so because I have some heavy video activity coming-up and thought I might need the extra bandwidth, which is substantial.  The important thing to understand about DOCSIS 3.0 technology is that it’s not a big deal, really.  It’s just channel bonding.

Where earlier cable modems had users on each subnet sharing a single analog video channel (generally channel 80), DOCSIS 3.0 devices can grab several channels and aggregate bandwidth.  Think about it, under this scenario if a cable system operator were to abandon its analog signal entirely in favor of a total IP solution that would mean a 100X increase in shareable bandwidth on each subnet — subnets that are already for the most part interconnected by fiber.  That’s 30 gigabits-per-second or more to be share in your neighborhood alone for a cost that amounts to about $300 compared to the average $1350 per customer Verizon is spending to install FiOS fiber.

Some cable companies will use DOCSIS 3.0 to take down the local phone company, which will be hard-put to compete.  And they’ll have support from the TV manufacturers as well as cable box makers.  My new 58-inch Panasonic Plasma TV has an Ethernet port on the back and all Panasonic’s competitors would like us to buy new TV’s too.  And don’t forget who is America’s largest maker of cable boxes — Cisco.  You think they don’t want IP TV? Heck, they trademarked the term.

While what Google intends to install is fiber (or so they are saying right now) the ultimate beneficiaries of this project may be more traditional cable plants running mainly thick old coax.

Google wants to nudge this along because their ultimate goal isn’t to be an ISP but to live in the data center of the ISP providing us data with ads to go with it.  They want to drop one of those shipping container server farms into the parking lot of every cable head-end in America, ultimately providing gigabits of data without having to pay anything for bandwidth.