T-Shirt Design Contest

Threadless has a new T-shirt design contest, now through January 1, 2007. The 5 winning designers will receive $5,000, a gift certificate, and a year's membership. According to Tim O'Reilly,

One of the recurring themes on the O'Reilly Radar is that of "news from the future," the idea that, as William Gibson put it, "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." We look for events and people that give us signals about what is to come. I've recently been thinking a lot about threadless.com in this vein, and working them into my talks about Web 2.0 as a stunning extension of the principle of "harnessing collective intelligence" into the design of physical goods.

If you're not familiar with it, threadless.com might be described as a digg for t-shirt designs. Users submit ideas for t-shirts, which other users vote up, till the most popular are manufactured and sold. The site would be cool enough just as a social networking site. ... But think about it for a moment: This is a "crowd-sourced" manufacturing business.
... to my knowledge, threadless is the first to have put all the pieces together.
How far off is a future in which the creative economy overflows the thin boundary that separates "information" from "stuff"?

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