My first three months in the fatherland are over and I’m heading home. Not sure if this will work for anyone that hasnt flown a budget ariline, or got up at 3:30am to catch a flight or listened to the song recently but here goes:

Thanks to Joe at Fantastic Bonanza for the heads up on Medium Control. I dont think I’d ever seen them before but they have some really nice designs. Theres a sale on at the moment where you can pick up some cottony goodness for $19.95.

My Favourites:

The Threadless guys kindly agreed for me to add my dissertation to HipHipUK entitled

“Do consumers want to design unique products on the internet?”
A study of the online Virtual Community of Threadless.com and their attitudes to Mass Customisation, Mass Production and Collaborative Design.

It will go up later today but the page is ready here http://www.hiphipuk.co.uk/research/

I surveyed over 200 hundred people from the Threadless Community and the result is 85 fun packed pages of research, pretty graphs, bad spelling and grammar all about Virtual Communities, Involvement vs Uniqueness, Manufacturing Approaches, Design Contests, oh and tshirts.

I didnt want it to sit gathering dust with the ideas going out of date, so hopefully somebody might find it useful.

I’ll also use some of the content on future posts here in the next few weeks/months.

Today HipHipUK has reached the ripe old age of six months old. The fact that I’ve been able to commit to something for that long is a big achievement for me. Its rare that I can even commit to trying to commit to something.

As I said yesterday we’re now averaging around 500 uniques a day which i’m really impressed about considering the nicheness of the topic. My highlights of the year so far:

- Reaching more comments than posts

- My new job in 2.0 (HipHipUK definetely helped with that)

- All the great mails people send me, even if your just plugging stuff. It allows me to pretend that i’m popular for just a short moment before I see that what you’ve sent me is already on four other tshirts blogs..

- Every small milestone, first comment, 100 visitors day, first contact email. Its been a blast.

Most Viewed Posts so far:

1. 7 reasons why threadless doesn’t rule

2. Double Dutch pt 1 (I have no idea why, its a shit post. I think it might be google image search related)

3. HipHipUK meets Enclothe

4. The Community is King series, pt 1, 2 and 3

5. Le Web Hijack

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that visits, I’m not sure what you actually do here or why you come back but I really appreciate it!

More to come later today….

Full Posts returning soon, big changes coming up on HipHipUK next year, Im current finalising my ‘07 blog plans. More to follow. Here is a roundup of whats been happening recently:

1. Three new shirts at Imaginary Foundation. As usual they are stunning but you probably wouldnt wear them, or at least I wouldnt. I’m not sure a tshirt is the best platform for their designs, theres just too much going on. I’d love some of these designs as prints though.

2. HipHipUK added to streetwear-websites but in the rather more dull Streetwear Business Section. Feel free to vote for me, I only have one site as my competition “Indie Clothing Blog“. Its a nice blog but only about five posts old, and still I’m rated 2nd out of 2. Quite an achievement I feel.
3. Suprisingly the post about Le Web and Pixelotto sent a ton of traffic this week. Thursday was HipHipUK’s record day with 800 unique visitors. Its been running for nearly 6 months now and every week theres been a new traffic record. It averages around 500 uniques a day now which is great, better than I ever expected. Thanks to everyone who stops by or sends me emails.

4. Incase you didnt realise its the big mans birthday soon so there are sales happening everywhere. Tshirt island has the best roundup here
5. If you like to keep things a little bit more low-brow Bustedtees are having a special two day free shipping promotion for today and tomorrow (18th/19th). Just enter “yessir” as the coupon code.

6. Tcritic spotted this nice little tshirt exchange community called rethreaded, full post on this later.

Tomorrow is HipHipUK’s six month birthday, happy half birthday to me, happy half birthday to me. A full review of the first six months in the t’osphere tomorrow.

(Guy in row in front of us during french politicians speech, more on ami’s flickr)

Theres a lot of negativity around le web today, the conference room is half empty and people seem more than a little disgruntled. The problems

a) Poor panel moderation, not pushing panelists to do anything more than pimp their companies

b) Hijacking of the event by politicians, mainly french presidential candidates but also Shimon Peres. Considering that Loic was most proud that 51% of the attendees were not french, today everything has been shifted around several times to accomodate speechs by politicians. These have no relevance to a large portion of the audience.

c) stupid vague titles for the panels, no-one seems to know what they are talking about and we waste too much time defining terms and related semantics.

A nice summary of all the negativity is here
The really annoying thing is that none of these people have any interest in the attendees or the event. They are presenting for the camera crews standing two feet in front of them, and not the atendees sitting 20 feet behind (a large number of whom have left). We are renting them our stage space and time to further their own agenda.