Image via Wikipedia Sorry - I couldn’t resist the cheesy summer joke. I am so not ready for summer to be over and I need to spend a few more afternoons by a pool - for now I will just blog about pools. This is a different kind of pool - the Spreadshirt Photo Pool on Flickr. If you are on Flickr - please share you pictures with us in the Spreadshirt photo pool - we really want to see what you look like in your shirts. Include a link to your shop - it is a great easy way to promote your shop too.

Vote for your favorite Instructables for the first ever Instructables book. Spreadshirt has been a big fan of Instructables, ever since I first discovered the site over a year ago. In the past year they have continued to become an awesome how-to community, and they now have an Instructables t-shirt shop powered by Spreadshirt - with some mighty good looking shirts. They have a contest happening now - vote for your favorite instructables, the top 50 vote getters will be mentioned in the book. Click here to start voting. Check out this page for some of the other cool contests they have running - I think the Horny Toad Invent-a-Sport contest is going to be a good one.

Here are 3 of my favorite instructables that I just voted for:

• How to Make a Marshmallow Gun or Marshmallow Shooter.
• Turn Signal Biking Jacket
• How To: Ping Pong Lights

Here are some other related and not so related blog posts that I am reading today. Enjoy!

• Repurpose Your Empty CD Spindle [Video Demonstration]
• Best of Instructables book contest
• HOWTO bake Nintendo 1UP cakes
• Star Wars Election ‘08
• HOW TO - Giant Papercraft Gandhi

I am loving the new feature on Google Maps that lets your create your own map. I have just created this map about Local Fabric Shops and it has been fun to see what local fabric shops people have been suggesting. So I was thinking this would be a great way to display some of our Spreadshirt shops that are about a place. 

So here it is - the big bad map of Spreadshirt Shops. Of course I started with IheartPGH and I also added a St. Louis Shop - StLouieLouie.com  I need your help to fill up the rest of this map.  Does your Spreadshirt shop sell shirts that promote a place?

• cities
• towns
• establishments - restaurants, parks, museums
• bands

Anything associated with a place - we want to add your shop to the map. Please leave your shop and its location as a comment or send me an email. I will add new shops to the map. I hope we can fill this up with a country of city loving t-shirts.

Ami (he writes for the German Spreadshirt blog) sent me a link to this article from a shop partner with 5 ideas for promoting your Spreadshirt shop. Here is a summary of the 5 ideas, click here to read the entire article.

1. Create a myspace/facebook/linkedin profile for your website and add people you know.
2. Buy one of your own shirts out of the shop.
3. Do something newsworthy while wearing your shirt.
4. Post on T-shirt and clothing line blogs.
5. If your flat out broke, Look for something in your household you’d be willing to part with for free.

Ami, found this via Summize.com - which is an awesome little site that lets you search Twitter. I just did a search for IheartPGH and found all sorts of interesting stuff. I am adding the Summize feed for a search on Spreadshirt to my google reader right now. I think this is also a cool way to see what people are saying about hot topics on twitter. I might just try a search for Obama, Clinton and McCain to see whats happening in the presidential race.

It is the little things in life that often bring the most joy.  One of the things I love is getting the email that says “SOMENAME is now following you on twitter.”  It is just cool to see who wants to see what Spreadshirt has to tweet about.  I like to check out their twitter pages and their link.  So I thought I would take the opportunity to share a few of the recent people that are following Spreadshirtcom on Twitter.

• Ami - http://twitter.com/ami - Ami works for Spreadshirt in Germany.  His tweets are in german.  I think it is just kind of cool to have multiple languages following the Spreadshirt Twitter.  If you read german you should check out his blog.
• Spndoctr - http://twitter.com/spndoctr - he has got a nice little blog but I really enjoyed the link to his wife’s blog - The Domestic Diva - she offers up some great product reviews of baby and kids stuff as well as some funny posts.
• Twubble - http://twitter.com/twubble - is a totally awesome tool that helps you find people that you might want to follow, but aren’t yet following by looking at who your followers are following.  I had to reread that last sentace to make sure it made sense.  Just try it - Twubble is cool.

Are you on Twitter?  Are you following Spreadshirt?  http://twitter.com/spreadshirtcom

T-critic has an interesting post about how the internet is changing consumer culture and that consumers have so many opportunities to interact and create their own products.  Karl provides some nice links to other sites about consumerism.  He also includes a link to a new Facebook group - T-shirt Appreciation Society.  The group already has 50 members and some great links to other t-shirt shops and sites.

While you are Facebook - stop by and join the Spreadshirt Facebook group.

I was very excited to read about Rumplo on Fantastic Blognanza.  Rumplo is a social networking site for t-shirts - you can save and share your favorite t-shirts, see new shirts, leave comments on shirts and share with your friends on Rumplo.  The site is really well designed and very easy to use.  I also like how easy it is to add a t-shirt to Rumplo - just submit the url and it does the rest.  But then a roadblock, Rumplo does not accept t-shirts from Spreadshirt!

Here is their explaination:

After initially allowing submissions from on-demand printers we’ve stopped. We found the kind of shirts submitted from on-demand printers were of markedly different styles than the community of independent t-shirt shops that we created Rumplo to serve. And Cafepress and other services like it already provide many of the tools Rumplo offers, as well as a community of sorts, so we decided to focus on serving t-shirt artisans and shops that don’t have these tools available to them.

I am saddened by this because I know that Spreadshirt has some amazing t-shirt designs and that our flex flock printing is as good as (and often better than screen printing).  So Rumplo is cool, but is limited in its selection of cool t-shirts.

I was taking a look at this list of Web 2.0 resources, which kindly includes Spreadshirt as a favorite when I discovered this amazing little tool.

I love tracking my packages - I like to see where my box is at any given time so I am always looking for the tracking number, going to the website and reentering everything. With this little tool - you can now track your package from the comfort of your RSS reader - no more return visits to the tracking website.

Package Tracking with Google Maps and RSS from iSnoop.net

Here is a screen shot of my package:

Black with gold is one of my favorite color combinations.

The blog post about this t-shirt is getting some Diggs. I have noticed that campaign t-shirts have been getting lots of traffic from StumbleUpon. If you have campaign shirts in your shop you might want to submit them to StumbleUpon, Digg or some of the other social sites out there. We have been checking out a new social shopping site - Kaboodle - I am just learning to use it but it has a nice Firefox extension.

This shop partner took an existing graphic and improved it with custom text. You can find thousands of graphics to use in your shop in the marketplace. When you find a design you want to use to create products in your shop - just click the link on the left side that says “add to my shop.”

Happy Super Tuesday! Today is a big big day for political fans. Before I worked at Spreadshirt, I used to work on political campaigns, once you start following these races you can’t stop. I was watching Meet the Press on Sunday, here is how, Tim Russert describes Super Tuesday to the panel - “It’s Christmas, kids.” Luckily campaigns need t-shirts and people like to wear t-shirts to support their candidates so we have been following the campaign season here at Spreadshirt. Tobias sent me a link to this awesome project today - PollingPlaces.NewYorkTimes.com. The New York Times has created this website where anyone can post pictures of their polling places and leave notes about their experience. This is a really interesting way to use crowd-sourcing to get a broad snapshot of polling places across the US. And it is really kind of neat to see how different each poling place looks.
Of course I had to do a search for the word t-shirt. Here is a picture of a polling place in Columbus, Indiana - if you look closely you can see the volunteers wearing t-shirts for their candidates.

Visit PollingPlaces.NewYorkTimes.com to look a more pictures or to post your own pictures of your polling place.