We did it 'cos we could!

On the 21st of March a large majority of my day was spent down at Oriental Bay helping dig [business:Made from New Zealand]'s colossal 50 fern. This was awesome effort from which was only decided to be done a few days earlier by Made From director [person:Tim Norton].
Throughout the day we had many onlooker's curious about why exactly we were digging up Oriental Bay, "'cos we can!" seemed to be my common reply. This wasn't just some smart-alec reply either, nobody had any major problems with what we were doing, it was just an awesome group of kiwi's (not just New Zealanders), doing something out of the ordinary to promote the kiwi attitude.
The day turned out to be a huge success, with the fern was completed and filmed before Wellington's unpredictable weather took hold. There are plans in the pipeline for other ferns to be dug around the country, and I have to admit, it is an awesome thing to be a part of.

Blog Syndication - Going Beyond RSS

One of the really cool things I've been working on at Made from New Zealand is the blog syndication system. We originally built it to link between our stories section (which is a Wordpress blog) and the rest of madefromnewzealand.com (which is a Ruby on Rails site). To overcome this we decided to use a business widget similar to Crunchbase which is generated by a small javascript file unique to a specific business, user, or network on Made from New Zealand, we can then track the article and pull a snippet and image for us to post throughout our site (homepage, industry pages, location pages and business/user/network profiles), all linking back to the blog post. This inter-linking power is lapt-up by Google which should mean for better ranking for both your blog and our site (there's gotta be something in it for us). To get amongst this you need to join madefromnewzealand.com and register your blog (so we don't get spammer's giving us hell), for those with Wordpress you can install our neat little plugin which lets you use a cool shortcode to automagically create a link to the entities profile and put the widget at the bottom of the page. I'm working my ass off for to cater for everyone else (including myself), but you can still register and get some linking love happening.