Word of mouth

The trouble with letting people write their own opinions on things online is that they can abuse the system for the purposes of comedy. This can lead to some odd occurences, perhaps none odder than the story that a T-shirt on Amazon has risen 2,300% through the Amazon rankings in the last few days.

This happened after users started to read endless positive, 5-star, tongue in cheek reviews of the T-shirt, in a collective joke that has had unforseen consequences. This is not the first time this has happened on Amazon - a photo of Paul Ross has equally positive reviews, although we don't think the reviews have increased sales. People still have some sense.

Softwear

Microsoft is a company that has, in most ways, become part of people's lives on a daily basis - internet, word documents, slideshows, spreadsheets - all run on their operating systems. Although this is being written on a Mac, so they don't own everything.

However, one area we don't think many people would have seen them move into would be the world of t-shirts. But they have. Quite why remains something of a mystery, but some of the designs aren't that bad - see - but as you can see from the one on the right (in larger size here), they're not all quite the kind of thing you'd want to be seen in.

Still though, it shows the market for brand allegiences that exists, and if a company like Microsoft thinks its worth moving into it makes you wonder who could be next to put their founder on a t-shirt...any suggestions? Use the comments button below!

Election day

So today is the day. The American Election is upon us. What the outcome will be seems decided (if the polls are correct), what the will hold though is unknown. But even among all this there are stories about clothing tucked away behind the more heavy-hitting articles on foreign policy and economic policies.

The story concerns a woman who went to vote and was told she couldn't because she was wearing 'a campaign t-shirt'. Except the t-shirt was only a souvenir t-shirt she had bought when on holiday in Alaska. American voting law, in some states, forbids the wearing of clothing that is of a direct campaigning nature or shows the candidate images, and a polling official believed the reference to Alaska to be of a serious enough level to ban her from voting.

Eventually she got to cast her vote after some good conflict management resolution by the polling officer in overall charge, which is the main thing.

Interactive T-shirts

Technology is wonderful and often incredibly useful. Othertimes it's just fine to use it to make cool stuff though. This is one of those times. These t-shirts, actually change their pattern depending on various things. The one pictured is a music equaliser that reacts to the volume of the music as a normal equaliser bar would.

Another picks up wi-fi signals in the area and changes its display as to the strength of that signal. Pretty groovy and just shows what the humble T-shirt can be used for with a little imagination.

So come on. What other technological innovations could a t-shirt use?