We just got word that my brother is going to have a baby boy in July! Lucas Daniel is that little guy’s name. I think every time he kicks his momma’s stomach, he actually just lined up for a 40 yard field goal. Congratulations Darren and Noemi!

Last night, while I was still in town for meetings, I visited the Social Media Club in Dallas. The topic of discussion was social media’s effect on political campaigns. Two of the main issues were the Dallas mayoral election and if the blogosphere can influence the upcoming Presidential campaigns at this stage of its growth.

In the Dallas mayoral election, one of the candidates is a guy named Zac Crain. He is considered a longshot because his previous job was music editor of the Dallas Observer……not exactly groomed for the oval office or anything. However, because he has embraced the internet as his soapbox, he is beginning to gain steam. His campaign is very progressive and is probably an indicator of what is to come in the mainstream political process.

On the national level of the Presidential campaign, we looked at Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean. Check out Barack’s website and tell me if the icons remind you of a similar look. I wonder who the target market is for that feature - my.barackobama.com??

Finally, it is time for me to give some shout-outs. Here are some of the people I met last night….they were Tony Wright of Kinetic Results, Jake McKee of Big in Japan, Sunni Thompson of Advertising Ourselves to Death, and A. Blaine Collins of Stronger Teams.

The subject matter at Refresh Dallas was all about Amazon Web Services. This proved to be fairly irrelevant for me business-wise but yet interesting enough to keep my attention. The three services focused on the most were EC2, S3, and the Mechanical Turk. EC2 was a bit too developer related and S3 as a backup bulk storage service is still considered unstable because Amazon won’t comment on the future of the service. S3 sounds promising because the cost is so low and the method of transfer reaching torrent speeds is so fast, I think I will still try it without using any mission critical data.

Finally that leads us to the Mechanical Turk……Amazon’s version of artificial intelligience. The service is still in beta but there are some simple success stories from those that have used it. The system is a way to put out a request for a service/opinion that can’t be automated by a machine. The instance used last nite was tagging images with labels that only humans could describe such as a man having a beard. You can set up the project with a price you are willing to pay per image and the turks sign up for that project. Something like 200,000 images for $.10/image and you can have a whole catalog tagged and ready for indexing in a few days.

I can think of a few ways that this could be time-saving and very cost effective, especially when you have grunt work that can’t be handled by a snippet of code. Someone needs to create a platform for this that makes it easy to integrate it into proprietary systems and we can all begin to unleash the turks.

I am in Dallas for meetings this week, so I checked out some of the events going on here. It just so happens that Monday and Tuesday there are some Web 2.0 get togethers. On Monday night I am headed to Refresh Dallas in Plano. I am hoping to meet some people that I have had conversations with through blogs, friends, etc. I will post about it afterwards. I always have a good time at Refresh in Houston but we didn’t have a meeting this month. I guess I will still get my fix.

Just last week we added digital printing to You Design It. This means that there are no longer minimums for some of the products. The pricing is good and the turnnaround time is unbeatable, with us usually shipping out a custom t shirt in 24-48 hours. We are still learning the technology and should be increasing the product selection soon. We have already received a few orders and the artwork is looking good.

This is the inaugural first post. I intentionally want it to suck so that I can look back and laugh at it. Check out the theme, it is inspired by my boardshorts. I have a lot of stuff to write about and I am hoping to keep it regular. My next post is going to be about what subjects and issues you can expect to read about in my blog. Speaking of posts, stay posted.