Seth Godin had an interesting piece yesterday morning. He has a toaster that makes toast in 10 steps, which is cumbersome for a toaster. He compared it to ebay, which took him 11 steps to pay them $6. I think Seth missed an important point that he could have made.

We make websites. We as in (presumably) you, and myself. Assumedly, we all do this for a living. This means that most of the day, we’re business people. A wise man once said, “My money is your wallet. I just have to figure out how to get it into mine.” Eleven steps is not going to cut it unless you’re a powerhouse like ebay.

I’d like to point out Apple, yet again. It’s not that I’m a fan, it’s just that they do a lot of things right. You see, I, like everyone else on the internet, have only to fire up pirate bay if I want free music. But almost all of my music is purchased music. If I want a new song I simply pop open iTunes and buy it. It’s on my iPhone in seconds. Apple took one of the most saturated, overdone markets on the planet and figured out a way to get their money out of my wallet… they made it easier for me to spend money.

That’s what it’s all about in business, right? Making money. Making bread… and sometimes toast.

My advice to Seth is this: Throw out that toaster. It reinvented the wheel for no reason whatsoever. Go back to when toasters tosted bread in 2 steps.

Don’t confuse movement for progress, people.

Everyone is up in arms today about Ford apparently calling people pirates, trademark violators, etc. This story is a lie.

I used to own the largest Ford Escort site on the internet. In 2000, we tried to get a calendar printed through CafePress, and were told that CafePress would not print the calendar because it contained trademarked images (the vehicles). That’s it, end of story. Ford did not stop the printing of any calendars, they did not sue anybody, and truth be told they probably didn’t even write a nastygram to get their cars not printed any longer.

Everybody is seriously over reacting. It started with the sensationalist headline of the post on Black Mustang Club, and spread from there. I doubt that 90% of the people commenting with hate for Ford even read the article and/or post it belongs to. BMC, you are not being picked on. This has been CafePress’s policy for at least 8 years.

Here’s the post I made on BMC:

Ok guys, I’ve been trying to reply to this thread all day.

The title of this thread is kind of sensationalist, and is untrue. Ford was never the one blocking your calendar from being made.

In 2000, I owned the largest ford escort site on the net. We tried to get a calendar printed up using our members photos. Cafepress refused to print it, and when I contacted them, they said I didn’t own the trademark that belonged to the cars pictured.

That’s it, end of story. Ford never said they own your images. They do, however, own the trademark to the image of the vehicle and are completely within their right to stop anyone from profiting because of it. I’m positive Ford would not have a problem with BMC making a calendar though, and as I believe I saw earlier in this thread, they were OK with it.

I used to get Ford.com IP addresses in my logs all the time and Ford never contacted me. I no longer even own a Ford, but I’m still just trying to set the record straight before however many of you swear off buying a Ford… they’re not the ones behind this. It’s been CafePress’s policy for at least 8 years.

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 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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