Militant Geek Custom Shirts

As I briefly mentioned yesterday MySpace has paired with on-demand T-shop Zazzle. The idea is to take MySpace’s tens-of-thousands of music profiles and allow them to sell customized shirts directly from their MySpace pages. MySpace already allows artists to sell their music to people through their deal with SnoCap. Selling T-shirts directly from the band profile pages is such a no-brainer it’s actually a surprise that its taken this long.

The issue this raises, from a non-musician standpoint, is how long will we have to wait for one of the major on-demand shirt printing places - be it Cafepress, SpreadShirt, or Zazzle itself to make an embeddable widget for custom tees. In the same way I can throw a YouTube video on my blog or social networking profile, why can’t I embed a customized T-Shirt shop? Instead of just posting pictures of geek shirts on this site why can’t I directly embed the creator’s store widgets and allow people to buy directly from here? While TShirt Takeaway does have this functionality the service has gotten poor reviews.

Diligent surfers of this site may have noticed that over the weekend we put a slick eBay widget in the sidebar. Sometimes the best geek t-shirts aren’t new but the vintage stuff off in someone’s closet. Whether antique corporate shwag, handmade tech homages, or kitschy promotions gone bad our ‘Today on eBay’ piece will highlight those T’s that we’ve linked to in our sidebar.

• The first is a great Star Wars inspired T-Shirt. ‘Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies.’ Less than 10 hours remaining.
• The next shirt is a vintage shirt from when Apple still had ‘Computers’ in its name. Auction ends in two days.
• The final eBay shirt for today is ‘Not on MySpace’. Given today’s news how Newscorp is trying to dump the property on a hapless Yahoo this shirt might be a great shirt for the Fox employee in your life. Bidding is open for two more days.