Every year I get behind Canteen and their Bandanna appeal, and I've got quite the collection going now. But this year I was looking for something a little different. I can certainly say that I've found that! Check out the Mr Four Square (aka Charlie) bandanna available this year. I sure got some funny looks from the kids at my son's preschool this morning.  Thankfully for me, my workmates are polite enough not to stare.  But funny looks don't phase me too much because I know I'm supporting a great charity, and I urge as many of you as possible to go and support Canteen and buy a $4 bandanna - even if you're not brave enough to wear it like me!  You can find them at most gas stations and supermarkets.

On that note... I'm also super keen to do the Movember thing to support both the Cancer Society and Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand.  (I missed out last year seeing as Movember coincided with my honeymoon!) I'm pretty happy to do it as a solo act, but I was thinking with our powers combined we could get quite the Mo collection going and make a combined donation to a couple of great charities... oh and have some fun at the expense of our marriages.

Anyone keen?

For all those petrol heads out there, this weekend was the ultimate phone-is-off-the-hook-I'm-not-taking-any-calls weekend - the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 weekend. And what has that got to do with Social Media? Well due to the timing of the school holidays I was busy driving my sons back home when the race was due to start. So how to keep up? Yup, that's right... Twitter. V8 Supercars has an official twitter feed going during races which means while you don't get to see the action, you sure don't miss out on much. So sign up for SMS updates, get your co-driver to read them out as they arrive in your inbox and Bob's your uncle.

Imagine if someone told you ten years ago that you could get live sports updates to your phone? I mean, none of this is any huge revelation these days - as a show of hands for those who have been using Twitter like this already will show. But what happens when Australia's domestic broadcaster, Channel 7 starts throwing ads into their broadcast while also going for the rather new-age techo approach of "live pausing" their live coverage? The petrol heads that are on Twitter trying to follow what's going on while watching said "live" coverage suddenly realise what you're up to and they start in with some serious road(less) rage. By the time we here in NZ (and other countries) finished watching the race, Channel 7 was twenty minutes behind in their coverage. The small cross-section of geeks/V8 petrol heads tweeting up a storm already knew who had won and from what I read, they were mad! Knowing who wins a race ahead of time kind of defeats the purpose of watching the last ten laps - and when they've just invested 7 hours in watching one race I can see their point!

One thing people in business are fast realising is how important Twitter is to interfacing directly with their customers and end users. It's quite a surprise then to find that Channel 7 is unlikely to listen to any of those fans stomping their feet via Twitter because their official Twitter feed hasn't been updated in over five months. (Perhaps they should be attending a Mogul Social Media workshop?) When you're upsetting thousands of people all at once, you want to make sure you have an open channel of communication to receive feedback. In this case, 7 already have one but it's clearly under utilised. For V8 fans it would be like walking up to a blind person and miming your displeasure at their seeing-eye dog digging up your garden. Okay, so petrol heads don't have gardens, but you get the point, right?

It doesn't really end there. The Kiwi petrol heads got in their usual tantrum mode when TV3 crossed to the news at 6pm, 20 laps out from the finish. Thankfully, TV3 cut it back to only 15 minutes so the last 10 laps were shown live. They'd even scheduled coverage to finish up at 7:30pm which meant for a change we'd actually get to see the podium presentations. Enter a rage like no other when reruns of the Simpsons kicked in at 7pm, well before the podium. Luckily for TV3, their Twitter feeds (note the plural) are well manned at @tv3nz and @3sport. (The less said about @3news though, the better)

I was quite surprised to see that #bathurst never made it into the international trending topics this weekend. Apparently Rage Against the Machine were doing something quite spectacular. Mind you when trending is a numbers game, that cross-section of Petrol-headed geeks I referred to earlier probably is quite small.

But the point I'm trying to make? In this day and age, more and more of our everyday lives are being influenced by social media, and in business there's no way that any of us can afford to ignore the role the social web is playing in helping shape society.

On Saturday afternoon, I presented to a room full of like-minded WordPress evangelists like ourselves on the topic of “Customising WordPress”.  I covered picking existing plugins from the WordPress Codex, a brief look into making plugins then leveraging and managing custom fields and content types.  From my side of the desk it was kind of a big deal – presenting to a room of 30-40 strangers (and a couple of cheerleaders in the front row) was a pretty full on experience, but I’ve had some good feedback already via Twitter.

This morning (Sunday) Matt brought Fruitbowl to the attention of the WordCampers and profiled how great a place Hawke's Bay is to work and play and what a difference Fruitbowl is making to the way our region interacts online.  Of course the general feel was really positive and Matt stirred some good discussion - mostly focussed on the way we (Fruitbowl) get things done, rather than the techy focus of my own talk.

All in all a great weekend away and while as a team we've certainly garnered a lot of good info (and had a great team building experience)  it was also certainly some good exposure for Hawke's Bay on the whole.  One of the event organisers even pointed out that Hawke's Bay was the place where all the cool kids go to live! Agreed!

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Incase you weren't already aware we are complete WordPress evangelists. We don't just build WordPress, we live and breathe it. So given the opportunity to take 3.0 for a test drive we were chomping at the bit. And we can tell you now that it delivers.

So what's new?

There's a whole new raft of "out of the box" features that WordPress 3.0 provides for users and developers alike. Here's what really excites us:

• Custom content types - previously limited to posts for a blog or pages for the rest of the site, WordPress steps up into the realm of true CMS by allowing the creation of any post type imaginable. Product catalog, anyone? Real Estate listings? Employee list?
• Custom Taxonomies - for those familiar with WordPress you'll know about categories and tags - custom taxonomies allow us to create limitless ways to include meta data about your content.
• Integrated Mutli-user - Need multiple blogs? Previously a separate project, WordPress now comes with WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) completely integrated. With the addition of the BuddyPress plugin it's now even possible to develop your own social network.
• Custom menus - we can now add almost any type of content to a single navigation menu.  Pages, posts, categories, tags or any custom content types or taxonomies - even links to external sites.

If you're anything like me, reading about it isn't really learning about it. So here's the official WordPress tutorial:

I'm so glad you're excited about it, Mogul, but...

...what does it all mean? Well, from our point of view it feels that the somewhat rigid structure of the already brilliant WordPress has just taken a turn for the better, sleeker and more flexible. This means we can now develop an even more fluid and extensible site that better suits the end-user requirements. There's also a number of improved backend processes that make managing the site even easier than before.

How we're using it

We've upgraded a number of sites to WordPress 3.0 already (including Fruitbowl!) and we've even built and launched two sites from the ground up using WordPress 3.0 as a base.  Before we really got our teeth sunk into a feature packed 3.0 site though we wanted to make sure that this new version still catered to the basic needs of our clients. And it does. Amazingly well, as always.  Right now we've got a number of great 3.0 sites in the pipeline that use some of these new features, so watch this space!

WordPress has truly matured from simple blogging tool to serious player in the Content Management System game.

So what are your thoughts?  How do you think we could use some of these new tools to improve your user experience?

You might remember back in April, Louie's logo design was chosen to embellish the sharp end of The Rock's project car, the Folden. When I put our name in the draw for the Speedy Signs Hell Hump Day Shout yesterday the thought that we were responsible for the Folden badge and that we'd never received any recognition was definitely in the back of my mind.  Imagine my surprise this morning when I got a phonecall from Hayden at The Rock and he told me they weren't bringing us Pizza tonight but instead we'd won the Friday Workplace Shout!!

So after work on Friday night, the team is being collected from the office by the Hummer Limo and driven to the Bluewater Hotel where they're putting $200 on the bar for us!  Karma (or is that Carma?) is awesome.  Thanks a million to The Rock and Motordrome Tyre & Auto Services (the prize sponsors) for getting our weekend off to a brilliant start!