Now, I’m not commenting on recent news items, but the option of buying New Zealand made products is looking more attractive by the day.

You’re probably familiar with the little red and blue kiwi emblem that signals a product is made right here in New Zealand (it’s part of the Buy New Zealand Made programme, which has been running since 1988). And you may have heard rumblings from our government over the last few years about the importance of buying items that are true blue New Zealand made. The government Buy Kiwi Made scheme was formed as part of post-election negotiations between the Labour Party and the Green Party. Around $11.5 million has been spent on supporting manufacturing initiatives and promoting the buying of New Zealand made goods.

If you shop with an eye out for the kiwi, you’ll help:

• Increase our country’s manufacturing capabilities
• Create employment opportunities for New Zealanders
• Build brand loyalty for Kiwi brands
• Reduce consumption of fuel for transport of goods and materials
• Reduce our reliance on imported goods
• Reduce New Zealand’s trade deficit (the value of our imports exceeds the value of our exports)

Buying local starts at home: look for the Buy NZ Made kiwi and ask your local NZ shops to stock New Zealand made goods!

Now, I’m not as certified space mad as our resident space cadet (you know who you are), but I do find space entirely fascinating, mysterious and enthralling. It’s the whole ‘unexplored expanse’ thing that gets me.

I still remember my dad (ever the adventurer) standing on the lawn with us in 1986 - I’d heaved my gumboots on to gaze skyward, neck aching, hoping to catch a glimpse of Haley’s Comet. To this day, I’m not sure I did actually see the comet (it might have been a smudgy star and it was a cloudy night), but it’s a great memory for what it’s worth. For those of you who share a curiosity about the universe, you’ll be rapt to hear that…

A lunar eclipse will be visible from New Zealand on August 28th!

A lunar eclipse is when the Earth passes between the sun and the moon. When this happens, the sun’s light can’t reach the moon’s surface and the moon enters the Earth’s shadow. Cool, eh? Keep your eyes skywards from around 8:51pm (the actual kick-off time is 7:52pm, but it won’t be visible until later) and stay tuned to the night sky between 9:52pm and 11:23pm, when the moon will be fully eclipsed. During this time, the moon will be a deep, coppery red, as the Earth’s atmosphere casts red light onto the moon’s surface. Take some time to ponder these lunar facts:

• Lunar eclipses can occur as many as three times in a year.
• If you were on the moon, the Earth would block the sun’s light and you’d see the dark Earth, ringed by light.
• Lunar eclipses last a maximum of 3 hours and 40 minutes, with a fully eclipsed time of 1 hour and 40 minutes.
• Lunar eclipses can be predicted using the Saros Cycle.
• Ancient civilizations feared eclipses and saw them as cosmic signs of famine and disease to come.
• Even today, some cultures are superstitious about eclipses (people in the Arctic turn over their utensils to prevent contamination and the Japanese cover their wells so they won’t be poisoned)

Oh, and Christopher Columbus predicted a lunar eclipse in 1504, to impress the native Jamaicans with his power and might, so why not play a trick on one of your more gullible friends? If you want to find out about other amazing things out there in space, visit our NZ astronomy category.

Well, it seems like just yesterday that the only way to have your say on community issues was by writing a letter to the editor (hand writing, mind) and posting it by snail-mail to your local newspaper. Now, thanks to sites like uthink, you can have your say on pretty much anything that tickles your fancy (or gets you in a lather!).

Taking a look around this community forum, you’ll find a plethora of issues that have sparked discussion, outrage and strongly voiced opinions. Want to know what people really think about child abuse, Air New Zealand carrying troops to Iraq, or the judicial system in New Zealand? Then take a look at what uthink tells us wethink.

But it’s not all current events; it’s more like a snapshot of New Zealand society, with everyone getting a look-in. I suppose it highlights what matters to us at any given moment. Topics span everything from movie reviews to parenting, relationships, sport, lifestyle choices, and those great dividers, religion and politics.

One of the things I love about this site is that it has one of those nifty tag clouds (like our very own Swicki search). Tags are simply a way of indexing and categorizing information using selected keywords (for instance, an article on endangered monkeys might be tagged with ‘animals’ and ‘conservation’). You can tag almost anything: articles, websites, pictures and videos. This allows all the links/pictures/articles with the same tag to be viewed together.

A tag cloud is, as the name suggests, a cluster of tags. The size of each tag’s font in the cloud indicates the relative popularity of each topic. On sites like uthink, the tagging of all posts on the forum means you can easily see current hot topics (the great thing about tag clouds is their dynamic nature - they’re constantly changing!). According to uthink, we’re currently hot under the collar about Nelson, money, power prices and chicks. Amongst other things.

Check out this site and other community forums to get thinking and keep in touch with grass roots New Zealand.

Kiwis in space? That’s the dream of space addict and entrepreneur, Mark Rocket, and the team at Rocket Lab.

As codirector, Rocket is right behind the developments of Rocket Lab, a private space company whose 5.5 metre sub-orbital rocket is due to be launched in September 2008. As well as this latest feather in his cap, Rocket is director and founder of NZS.com, and has a successful tourism directory and Web design company to his name.

Rocket Lab’s technical director, Peter Beck, has been hard at work developing rocket propulsion technology for more than a decade and yesterday unveiled Atea-01 (’atea’ means ’space’ in Te Reo Maori), a sub-orbital space rocket. Beck said the rocket “will be launched using systems designed to deliver high standards of environmental and public safety.” It will fly to a height of 150 kilometres and be available (at a going rate of between $50,000 and $100,000) for scientific testing and research into climate change, micro gravity and atmospheric conditions. Traveling at four times the speed of sound, the unmanned rocket will be powered by a specialised solid fuel, designed for minimal environmental impact.

What makes New Zealand such a great location for space technology development? Rocket says our clear air space and receptive regulatory environment make New Zealand the perfect location for space technology to flourish. Speaking this morning, Rocket is looking foward to a bright future. He has enjoyed “a superb response since Rocket Lab’s public launch yesterday” and is “very excited about the prospect of forming a space industry in New Zealand.”

Trevor Mallard, Minister of Economic Development, agrees. He has praised Rocket Lab’s creative vision and believes their innovative, low cost solutions will not only provide relatively affordable public access to space; they’ll also lead to the creation of an internationally respected sub-orbital space industry in New Zealand, with positive flow-on effects for our aviation and technology sectors. Mallard says Rocket Lab shows pioneering creativity, “leveraging off New Zealand’s unique geographical position and creating a specialist area of technical expertise.”

Stay tuned for further developments: Rocket claims space hotels, launch pads and space lines are all part of the private space industry’s current speedy development.

In my last post, I talked about some of the things search engines like about the websites they rank highly on their results pages. One way I mentioned was to get votes from 3rd party websites. Here’s more on how you can get ‘votes’ for your site.

Getting other website owners to ‘vote’ for your Web site is all about getting them to publish a hypertext link on their website, which points to one of your Web pages. The more links pointing to your website not only means ‘more votes’ but provides more ways for people and search engines to reach your Web site.

Presidential link bait
The best way to get links from other websites pointing to your website is to publish content (link bait) that is so mind-blowingly brilliant that another Web site owner just WANTS to link to it.

Linking leg work
You can also ask website owners to publish a link to your site. Start with friends and associates, then move onto specialist, national and international directories. Spread your wings further by seeking out websites (preferably relevant to your business) that also publish links or ‘resources’.

The online back-scratch
Some website owners will only publish a link to your website if you publish a link to theirs in exchange. This mutual back-scratching is called, unsurprisingly enough, link exchange. NZS.com offer a FREE bold listing for link exchanges - it’s well worth checking out their link exchange offer.

You can read more about some of the best practises for link building and link exchange, in Link Building Made Easy.

That’s all from me for now folks. Cheerio!

How does one actually go about tramping? There’s two categories of things you need: objects that you need to take, and things that you need to know. This blog post deals just with objects you need to take. What you need to know will be in next in the Wild walking series. So, what should you take with you on a tramp? The overriding rule here is small and light.

Check out some outdoors shops for a good selection of outdoor gear and equipment.

Calling all bookworms!

I love a good book: printed on leaves of real paper, bound with hard or soft cover, typeface carefully chosen, page layout designed to please the eye, and that smell of just-printed newness. The tactile nature of books is part of their appeal for me, as well as the stories they tell and the information they impart.

But is digital fiction the way of the future? Now there’s a New Zealand online bookstore peddling digital eBooks, covering business, marketing, sports, computing, health and entertainment genres. And while eBookworms don’t sell fiction titles (eBookmarks is geared more towards practical guides and DIY books), they do offer food for thought on the future of hard-copy books.

Ebooks are books in electronic format that can be easily purchased and downloaded to your PC, Mac, laptop or PDA. For luddite readers, ebooks can be printed out to be enjoyed on paper. In digital form, they’re great because:

• You can read them anytime, anywhere
• Trees don’t have to be cut down to make them
• No physical storage space is required
• They can be carried easily and safely from place to place
• Links can be included from the text to useful websites or related information
• Audio and video material can be contained within a book

Check out digital and old-fashioned books in our New Zealand bookshops category.

Early this month, Statistics New Zealand released the Internet Service Providers Survey from March 2007, providing fresh information on broadband usage in New Zealand.

Key to the report is the finding that more Broadband users are on faster download speeds, with 2 - 10Mps now the most common speed (as at 31st March 2007), a shift from the previous six months where 512kbs - 2Mbps was the predominant download speed.

The Broadband vs Dial-up battle is tipped to switch soon with 739,000 subscribers on dial-up (down 4.1% from six months earlier) and 724,600 using broadband (up 18.5%).

On the email front, 98.4% of Internet subscribers have now adopted email filtering products from their ISP (including both free and charged).

The next instalment of the Internet Service Provider Survey will be released in March 2008.

Looking to get connected? Find NZ Internet Service Providers in the NZS.com directory.

You know how much I love free things. Who can resist a giveaway, even if the item in question is completely useless or impractical?

But this, ah, we’re onto a winner.

Good ol’ Air New Zealand is offering you the chance to win flights to Australia in a gimmicky, yet oddly enticing, way. The deal is this: just send a message online to a friend in Australia (an expat Kiwi, of course) and it’ll be displayed on a billboard outside Customs House in Sydney. Just by sending this message to a mate, you’ll go into the draw for a return flight to Aussie (and so will your friend). The gallery of sent messages also makes for good voyeuristic viewing (as well as the usual ‘I luv you, will you marry me?’s, there are comedians out there writing gems like this one: Hey man, remember the time we ate a whole pair of jeans? Come home so we can do it again!).

Remember, NZS.com lists heaps of other sites where you can enter competitions and snaffle free stuff for yourself. And if you don’t fancy your chances of winning, why not book a flight to Australia to escape these far-from-tropical wintry days?

There’s much fun to be had on the dance floor, whether your thing is ballroom dancing, salsa, ballet, hip hop or break dancing. Even if you’re an amateur or closet dance fiend (dancing ’til the wee hours in dimly-lit nightclubs) there’s something about the combination of music and body movement that’s meditative, compelling and mystical. Dance is one of the most tribal things you can do.

The other night, I partook of some culture in the Christchurch Arts Festival. This wasn’t just any old culture, mind, it was a live dance theatre event! Of course dancing has really taken off as a spectator sport and as a pastime since Dancing with the Stars first hit our screens in 2005, but this was something quite different.

I Want to Dance Better at Parties was a dynamic and emotionally charged performance from Melbourne based dance troupe, Chunky Move, founded by artistic director Gideon Obarzanek in 1995. I don’t quite know how to describe the performance, which may have something to do with their self-described “distinct yet unpredictable brand of genre-defying dance performance.” It landed somewhere in the shared space between dance, film and documentary, examining the lives of five men and their experiences of dance. From real life experiences, the dance itself branched out to become a separate entity, while still remaining part of the tales being told. Let’s call it interpretational, life-inspired dance. Whatever, it was cool. Watching those dancers move so effortlessly and beautifully, commanding their bodies in ways that seem near impossible, was inspiring.

If you think this might be your cup of tea, why not check out some dance entertainment, find a dance event to drag your loved one along to, or learn how to kick up your heels in style with a dance class or two?