Last night I posted the Vimeo “Flagpole Sitta” video. The relation to Vimeo made me want to check out what Jakob Lodwick has been up to since his infamous canning from IAC. Little did I know, it would take me on an hour long easter egg hunt on the internet.

I’ll admit, Jakob (Or is it Jacob, as I found out?) has been a master of media manipulation in the past. If you don’t know the story, you can google the guy and read for days. But, I’m genuinely curious as to what is next on his list, being an aspiring entrepreneur myself.

The thing that led me on the hunt was his not so subtle mentioning of purchasing 17 domain names in the last few days. A few of which are related. In addition to that, he posted friday about having dinner with a “soon to be famous face”. In case you don’t know who it is… it’s David Karp, the owner of Davidville, Inc., which is the owner of Tumblr, a rising star in the web world and a favorite of Jakob Lodwick.

This leads me to believe one of three things;

1. Jakob Lodwick and David Karp are planning a project together.
2. Tumblr is in negotiations to be acquired or heavily funded.
3. Both of the above.

I can speculate on Tumblr’s acquisition until I’m blue in the face, Sid Yadav may be on to something, here.

Instead, I’ll focus on what I learned about Jakob Lodwick. First, by asterisking out some letters in the domain names he listed, he has issued somewhat of an open challenge. I did some creative reverse IP engineering, combined with a lot of whoising and thesaurusing, and I found out a few things. Jakob Lodwick owns quite a few domain names.

So, I know he’ll be learning CSS. I know he may be partnering with David Karp, and I know a lot of the domains he purchased.

• norbum.com
• norbum.us
• norbums.com
• norbumist.com
• norbumist.org
• norbumists.com
• norbumists.org
• norbumism.com
• norbumism.org

How did I find these? Well, I stumbled upon a very old domain registration of Jakobs, where he uses the name Jacob. That was all the info I needed. A quick search for domains purchased by Jacob Lodwick turned up the norbums.us domain name, and the rest was guess work.

The question now is of course, what is a norbum? Honestly, I have no idea. The only information I could find on norbum was a Russian sirname and a character in a crappy script.

This is as far as I’ve gotten. Can anyone shed any light on the mystery? Is it something related to New York? Is David Karp involved? I guess we’ll know before too terribly long!

Ok, so I don’t have an award show, or even an awards ceremony… or even an award process. I just wanted to share with you what I consider to be the video of the year. This video will make you want to work at Vimeo. The employees of Vimeo are the ones who made this video… enjoy!

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.

I’ve been lightly following a certain set of stories regarding Adobe phoning home whenever you start up CS3 products. The basic idea is this; When you start a CS3 product, it sends a few packets of information to 192.168.112.2o7.net, which is actually just a subdomain for the website 2o7.net, which is owned by Omniture, a statistics company.

I’m not saying they’re giving away my social security number, I’m not saying there are even any privacy issues here. However, two things are awry in this scenario. The first is that they’re trying to hide the website address by disguising it as a local-looking IP address. The second is that they’re phoning home, no matter what the information is, without my permission.

Guess what, Adobe? THIS IS SPYWARE.

John Nack, the product manager for Adobe Photoshop, took it upon himself today to write a blog post about the situation. In this post, Mr Nack is lashing out at users and customers without providing a single answer.

The main point that John keeps bringing up is that a lot of people are on holiday, so it’s the perfect time to put up some major speculative post, because the companies involved won’t be able to respond. He likens it to 2 posts that have occured in the past two consecutive years… which are also about Adobe.

John, I think you’re a little too concerned with yourself. The prior posts and this one occurring around the holidays are merely coincidence.

In addition, John, you quoted Doug Miller saying that “There are only 3 places we track things via Omniture anywhere in or around our products”. Given that this 2o7.net example was not listed, it makes this statement inaccurate and therefore quotable with a grain of salt. You can’t deny that the products are contacting 2o7.net… so there are 4 places you track things via Omniture.

Nowhere in your post do you address the following; 1) Why is the address intended to be hidden? 2) What information is Adobe collecting?

Instead of peddling the idea that your customers and users are crying wolf, and instead of defending yourself to the point of insulting your customers intelligence (Crying wolf?? No common sense??), you should concentrate on finding out the real reason behind the 2o7.net domain.

Until then, you should probably shut your mouth before your foot ends up in it. Oh, and run your post by HR next time if you want to save a bit of face.

Ok, so I read the description for Mozilla Weave incorrectly. When I first skimmed the headline and description on a blog somewhere, I thought it was innovative. After going to the actual page, I realized that although it’s been long overdue, the idea of Weave has already been implemented elsewhere.

It did get me thinking though… what if “what I thought Mozilla Weave was” actually existed? So, here’s a free idea for a budding entrepreneur or open source group.

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Last year I wrote an article on predictions for 2007. These are my predictions for 2008. This is part two of a two part series. In part one, I did a recap of my 2007 predictions.

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