Amateur attention seeker and entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick may be releasing a new project soon with Scott Karp, the creator of blogging tool Tumblr. Lodwick recently cut ties with both his beau, Julia Allison, and Connected Ventures, the startup he founded, now controlled by IAC and best known for Vimeo and College Humor. Without Barry Diller’s backing or Allison’s cleavage, how will the pasty, shirtless hipster generate the buzz he’s grown to expect but rarely deserves? By mocking the homeless.

CenterNetworks observed that norbum.org, a domain recently purchased by Lodwick, briefly went live with the message:

Norbum.org is an open, crowd-sourced, web 2.0 application powered by Tumblr. Why the name “Norbum”? Simply put, Norbum is like Nordstrom for the homeless. We bring to you the latest in urban street fashion from the people who live it. Rather than relying on an elitist group of professional editors, we invite our readers to submit photos of the most stylish street people from around the world. If you spot one of these edgy trendsetters, just snap a photo and email it to 2tvazf87@tumblr.com. We’ll post the best ones to Norbum.org.

Lodwick’s fashion sense has its own affinity with the homeless. But Norbum is clearly an attempt at attention-grabbing humor. I’ll concede the attention-grabbing part — I’m writing about it, aren’t I? — but the humor, after one weak chuckle, escaped me. Without Allison, without his partners at Connected Ventures, Lodwick’s limits are becoming more easily glimpsed. And less watchable every day.

Yesterday, after a bit of investigative journalism, we posted some of the domain names that Jakob Lodwick noted in a blog post on his Tumblr site. We tried to figure out what the name meant but came up dry. Today we know what the name Norbum means. I can only hope they are fooling with us.

Norbum.org went live today with the following message, "Norbum.org is an open, crowd-sourced, web 2.0 application powered by Tumblr. Why the name “Norbum”? Simply put, Norbum is like Nordstrom for the homeless. We bring to you the latest in urban street fashion from the people who live it. Rather than relying on an elitist group of professional editors, we invite our readers to submit photos of the most stylish street people from around the world. If you spot one of these edgy trendsetters, just snap a photo and email it to 2tvazf87@tumblr.com.  We’ll post the best ones to Norbum.org."

Can I get a WTF from the congregation? They show about 10 photos of what appear to be homeless people from photos on Flickr. I guess they wanted to start with something on the site upon launch but the message notes that you should email the photos to a tumblr account.

So if this is real, you are supposed to take photos of homeless people around the world, send them to Norbum and then Karp and Lodwick will decide which ones they should publish to the site. Since the photos are being sent mostly via mobile I imagine, there will be no attribution (the Flickr photos have non-commercial licenses from what I can tell). 

Do you all believe this is real? I can’t believe that two intelligent people and successful entrepreneurs would use their creative juice to just post photos of homeless people unless of course there is more to the site that we can’t see yet.

When Jakob Lodwick left was fired from Vimeo earlier this month, I immediately predicted that Lodwick would be working with Tumblr founder David Karp. It seems this might be closer to reality with some investigative journalism just completed by regular CN visitor and author, James Thomas.

This past Saturday, Lodwick posted about some new domains that he registered. The list includes:

• D***S***.COM
• BA******RO****.COM
• n*****.com & .us
• n*****s.com & .us
• n*****ist.com & .org
• n*****ists.com& .org
• n*****ism.com & .org

The previous day Lodwick posted that he had dinner with Karp per his blog post and calls Karp a, "soon famous face."

This is where Thomas went to work. After some Columbo-type maneuvers, we know the full names of some of the domains that Lodwick registered:

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

Anyone know what a Norbum is? Let’s complete the picture before the new year rings!

Photos by: David Karp & Zach Klein