Lodwick's potential swan song goes like this:

1. I'm okay.
2. Sometimes, being made fun of stings.
3. I acknowledge being stung, and move forward emotionally.
4. I compensate for being stung intellecually by writing off the stingers as perpetually unhappy downers.
5. Tone it down, prominent online gossip publications. You're fucking with the potentially advantageous harmony of the universe.
6. You make fun of weird people, but weird people are special, and you are mean.

Or to quote Lodwick:

Most people do not have my resilience. Eccentrics are delicate and need room to grow. Perhaps a gentler or more balanced approach to telling stories of our lives is in order. An attitude of "these guys are crazy but we love ‘em anyway" might be better for everyone than today's apparent mission: "destroy the weirdos".

Maybe he's correct! There's nothing wrong with eccentrics. They're enjoyable. And so are Lodwick's ridiculous exploits: in the same way a newscaster needs news to thrive, Lodwick's been giving us - spoon-feeding us - solid material for two years strong, now. In fact, one week ago was the two year anniversary of our first "Jakob Lodwick" tagged post!

It all started wayback in August of 2007, when the O.G. of Fameballing started dating Julia Allison, who, over the course of her career, has had few reservations about sacrificing herself on the altar of dignity in older to get a little publicity. She's now on MTV, so you can't say she didn't get the job done. Around that time:

"I believe I am an early-stage Fameball, and nothing I do or say will change my trajectory. I will attempt to use this to my advantage," Vimeo founder and Star Editor At Large Julia Allison doinker Jakob Lodwick has been quoted as saying.

And so it was. Lodwick was ousted from the company he started and hit the bong for us all to see. He claimed he was going to act like a normal human being. And then, after trying to start his own record label, is now aiming for New Museum-esque fame with videos like these:

Jealousy from Odwick.com on Vimeo.

And proclamations about how "cool" he is, like these:

I thought I was joking when I said I was so cool for being oblivious to the Super Bowl. But last night after dinner and a dance [sic] performace, quietly walking through the [sic] streetes of Manhattan and fearing for my safety in light of hundreds of screaming, drunken brutes, the joke became real. I do think I'm cool for being totally unaware of this moronic celebration of big men, big crowds, big bowls of dip, big commercials, and little brains.

Mind you, this is a guy who once had a pretty hot tech startup that perpetual money-spender Barry Diller - currently hosing down The Daily Beast with his cash, sans promised Amazing Ad-Model - had invested in. Nobody's denying the guy might have an idea or two about how to get a startup off the ground. Unfortunately, his ego and need for performance - well-documented in his latest video - might be getting in the way.

Either way, if Lodwick wants to avoid the pitfalls of being poked fun at altogether - as opposed to just having to cope with it - he might want to employ the strategy/sage advice devised by our own burgeoning entrepreneur, Richard Blakeley:

Then again, he does work for us. So, there is that. Meanwhile: pretty sure the symbiosis of the universe is gonna be fine. So long as Lodwick keeps feeding us good material, we'll keep reporting on it. Isn't that how it works?

Four months ago, Lodwick writes, he quit pot after realizing "it made me absolutely fucking retarded every time" (emphasis his). But that apparently doesn't mean the Vimeo founder is going to stop taking disturbing, semi-nude photos of himself, or making wacked-out, often half-naked videos. See the pic above, uploaded to Lodwick's Tumblr earlier today, or this new video of him channeling Eminem.

What Lodwick is going to do is make, and post to the internet, lists like these, illuminating just how much time he devotes to various forms of fameballing (a lot), and what he does with the rest of his time ("child's pose," "intellectual devotional," "Egosurfing"):

Lodwick has made quite a bundle from IAC, the company to which he sold Vimeo; the media conglomerate may even still be paying him $100,000 per year salary not to come to work. Perhaps we should all be grateful he's plowed that money into fizzled ventures like music-sharing site Muxtape (basically shut down by the RIAA) and record company Normative (three CDs for sale!), and that he's now obsessively making lists. As Lodwick himself has demonstrated, his sort of money can fuel a much more disturbing sort of late-20s identity crisis than this one.

Maybe it's all just performance art, the half-naked party appearances, brandishing that knife and going all Taxi Driver at a diner. But that doesn't really make it any less sad, the notion of a hipster millionaire fameball still clawing hungrily, strategically for attention. It would be more impressive if this were all some guerilla marketing campaign for a new class of hallucinogens. See excerpts from the latest installment above.

The fired Vimeo founder's latest posting to his video-sharing site is, frankly, frightening. It's also his first in three months.

The comeback, a lipdub of Little Boots' "Meddle," seems innocent enough if you don't watch it closely and completely. "Yay!" wrote one commenter. "You're back"

But about halfway into the video, Lodwick inexplicably swings a knife, which he keeps somewhere off camera. It's only later that Lodwick starts making angry punching motions and using psycho eyes to underline the lyric "you don't know what she hides."

This outburst comes from an on-again-off-again blogger as famous for his emotional volatility as for his prolific oversharing. Lately, his behavior has turned disconcertingly bizarre.

Last summer Lodwick produced a creepy psychedelic video, looking high and nearly catatonic. In January, he turned up at a Web industry networking event shirtless, sweating and flailing his arms. March's internet sex picture seemed an almost pedestrian way of acting out in comparison.

But now there's the knife video. The blade comes out quickly in the excerpt above. A frenetic, apparently naked Lodwick ducks in and out of an enveloping darkness. He's a tortured internet pioneer looking like he's ventured all the way into a new jungle, straight to the heart of dot-com celebrity darkness. He's Colonel Kurtz, and he's seen horrors.

Or maybe Colonel Kurtz was nuts to begin with and just found a way to make us all watch. We probably won't know whether there's anything to learn from the manifest pain of the world's most tortured millionaire until it's too late.

Rule No. 1: Convince the video's participants that the end product will be less embarrassing if they don't worry about being embarrassed while they make it. Get your people to either commit themselves fully to the project, or stay out of the way. Vimeo's companywide lip synch of Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" wouldn't work nearly so well if the girl listening to her iPod at the beginning didn't keep such a straight face. Know what else doesn't hurt? Actually memorizing the lyrics.

Rule No. 2: Get the heavies involved. Digg's "Groove Is In The Heart" from Mark Trammell wouldn't be nearly so worth watching if CEO Jay Adelson didn't start rapping two minutes in. Tocquigny's video featured only interns, making it seem like the real executives didn't take the PR project seriously. What kind of example does that set for the monkey-see-monkey-do younguns?

Rule No. 3: Plan meticulously and practice. Here's "L'amour a la française" from AOL France. Note how precisely the performers hit their marks. Note how cleverly new singers appear on the screen. That's dedication, people! (It probably didn't hurt that the most of these people knew they were about to be laid off and probably spent most of their remaining time working on this video.)

Rule No. 4: Learn to edit. Facebook code monkeys — here dressed as White Ninjas for the company's annual games day festivities — aren't actually supersneaky ninjas; that they appear as such comes from careful editing. A hint: Editing usually takes longer than filming.

Rule No. 5: Feature the most attractive coworkers prominently. Sure, a companywide video will probably include everyone from the company. But give the longest shots to the most attractive office-workers, like the girl listening to the iPod at the beginning of the Vimeo video or the swirling blonde in the middle of the video below made by Leonardo Dalessandri's production company, "Tambureddu." Also, be a little cynical and use a frame from one of those shots for the clips' still frame, which will appear in searches and embedded placements in blogs.

The site uses a package of Javascript, Mootools, which was also used by Muxtape. And in the source code, an HTML comment reading "Liberating taste" appears where an ASCII graphic appears in the Muxtape source code. The launch of Opentape is likely a tactic in Muxtape's fight against the RIAA. It puts the record industry trade organization in the position of having to play whack-a-mole as mixes pop up on numerous clone sites using the open-source software. It also means that Muxtape's backers no longer have to shoulder the site's soaring bandwidth costs.

Basic tools to help creators and other uploaders — like an upload status bar or a timer to let you know when an uploaded clip has been transcoded — are missing. For large clips, this can be maddening. Make a mistake uploading a clip? Good luck trying to replace the clip you've already uploaded with another. And if you accidentally upload the same clip twice, that's just time lost, since even with new descriptions set it'll be flagged as a "duplicate" and deleted. If your audio suddenly sounds terrible, its because YouTube forces it through a blunt compression filter. But hey, you can add funny captions to your videos!

When it comes to user experience for content creators, Vimeo and Blip.tv beat it soundly. But then why should YouTube care? If you want access to viewers who will inevitably slag you and your work in the comments, you'll have to put up with it to a degree. Better to post your content to YouTube via third-party tools like TubeMogul, which will also cross-post your video to multiple sites — making it the one-stop shop for content creators looking to publish that YouTube might have been.

IAC is moving ahead with plans to spin off four of its divisions by the end of August: HSN (which includes Cornerstone), Ticketmaster, Tree.com (which includes LendingTree), and Interval Leisure Group, which operates vacation sites including ResortQuest Hawaii. That leaves IAC with Ask.com, Match.com and Citysearch. What's happening? Simple: Diller and company have learned that bundling a bunch of diverse online businesses together doesn't create the promised "synergy" of the Web 1.0 boom. Better to let each site fend for itself. Since IAC got rid of Expedia in 2005 (Barry Diller's still chairman of the board), the travel site's ups and downs have closely followed the travel market. That's the watercooler version. You can wonk out with the full details.

"Please remove this script, it can only contribute to getting the site shut down," Ouellette wrote in April on Userscripts.org. "As long as you can hear the music you can copy it, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to do the diligence of trying to stop casual downloading (one of the things that would hurt its long-term viability)," he wrote on another occasion. "I was naïve enough to think assholes like you wouldn't want to wreak a good thing, but I guess I was wrong," he concluded.

He's been quieter since then, aside from suggesting the site would drop the popular MP3 format in an effort to stop downloaders. The scripters have kept up their efforts.

Not that this cat-and-mouse game matters. The RIAA has wisely left Muxtape alone, avoiding an ugly publicity squabble over a site that has yet to show any commercial potential. If it does begin to show some financial success, then the music-industry lawyers will swoop in demanding money.

People are swift to criticize the RIAA, which has made a number of boneheadedly unpopular moves. But what should we say about the naivete of entrepreneurs like Ouellette, who are hoping that battling Firefox script kiddies will somehow count in their favor when the record labels come knocking? Muxtape's lawyers might make a "safe harbor" argument under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — but that requires showing that Ouellette was unaware of copyright violations on the site. Hard to argue that, when he uses it himself.

Fraps are easy to shoot — just click record while playing a game on your PC. A 10-minute session at HD quality makes for a Godzilla-sized video file to upload to Vimeo.

But filespace isn't the only issue. Management is refreshingly blunt: Vimeo was meant to be a site to share personal real-world movie camera work with friends and family. Dammit, you kids with your Grand Theft Auto 4 clips are ruining everything. Starting in September, Vimeo will delete previously uploaded fraps and ban new ones. Its users, meanwhile, will just decamp to WeGame.com.

He's posted the above image — details of an apparent deal with the devil — to his blog, titling it "For personal reference only, please don’t read!" He's gently mocking his former charge, Ouellette, who accidentally emailed terms of his own deal with the devilishly pranky Lodwick to his blog instead of his own inbox. We're hoping Pile's gag keeps running, and encourage you to accidentally leak all your deals to us.

Pile is in the comfortable position of being able to mock Lodwick, Vimeo's Iconoclastic founder, because according to one source, he's largely responsible for saving the site, growing its traffic 600 percent in the last 8 months. What's Pile done so well? Our source says Pile has kept his team focused on improving Vimeo's usability with tweaks here and there, increasing traffic in 5 and 10 percent bumps that have really added up. But also, our source says, Pile's done a very good job of not being Jakob Lodwick, whose "focuses were kind of on the wrong things."

The suits, it turns out. Without Lodwick at the helm, Vimeo's gone from a flatlining also-ran to a fast-growing alternative to YouTube. NewTeeVee reports that Vimeo traffic more than doubled from February to May. Guess Lodwick just wasn't cut out to be a Killer Diller, after all.

Foolish disregard for his severance agreement aside, one has to ask this about Lodwick: What kind of entrepreneur or investor puts his deal terms online, in napkin or any other form? That's an easy one: the same kind of entrepreneur or investor who would relentlessly blog his sad relationship with noted New York nobody Julia Allison, quit the Internet over its injustices, rejoin the Internet in an effort to spread Ayn Rand's message, and then, in a huff for the ages, quit the Internet once more.

Update: Ouellette has taken the memo down, saying he posted it to the Web by accident.

More videos capture the 2008 Taipei 101 New Year fireworks display than any other on the Internet. See why.

Fireworks are best viewed at 30,000 feet.







Fireworks at 30,000 ft from Chris Bodenner on Vimeo.

Portland Rose Festival Fireworks! Click through to watch it in HD on Vimeo.







Portland Rose Festival Fireworks! from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.

The Brooklyn Bridge 125th anniversary fireworks — click through to watch it in HD on Vimeo.







Brooklyn Bridge 125th Anniversary Grucci Fireworks from Craig Seeman on Vimeo.

The Fourth of July scene from The Sandlot.

Apparently the last 24 Inch Fireworks Shell exploded in the States.

Fire Works 4th Of July 2007 Washington DC — the nation's capital.

More Fireworks in HD.







Fireworks HV20 from Vedran on Vimeo.

A 36 inch shell exploded in daylight.

This is called a 625 Shot Dragon Egg Fireworks cake and its completely insane.

(Photo by Mr Magoo ICU)

I closed my blog on June 26, 2008. I could no longer handle the relentless, vicious, public attacks from a digital lynch mob towards the personality traits I have no intention of changing, such as my curiosity and my self-confidence.

The humility here is staggering in its profoundity.

I may be a millionaire but I this sort of thing still hurts... You may conceptualize the Unites States as a great nation. But it’s also a big tribe, with its own irrational taboos. One of them is: don’t talk proudly about your achievements.

We feel for young Lodwick, we really do: it's just so hard at the top taking risks when at any moment you have the choice to live comfortably, unlike 99.9 percent of society.(Photo by Nick Gray)

BEASTIALITY from HolyHoly on Vimeo.