Gambling Guru's GuruBlog to take indefinite hiatus from the web

Over the past four months or so, GuruBlog has made a small but I believe valuable contribution to making people in Victoria, Australia and around the world aware of a range of issues in relation to gambling, and the potential harm that can be caused by it.

I have tried to focus on issues that impact the community, especially those in my own Southern Metropolitan Region of Melbourne, with the aim of educating and promoting awareness of a range of gambling issues.

Many posts have been confronting and thought-provoking to say the least, however I have tried to take an emotive approach in order to generate interest and critical thinking about gambling issues - a problem that while affecting a large portion of our community is not considered by many to be a significant health issue.

Many may not have agreed with everything written here but in terms of generating debate the blog has been successful. Before this blog started in August 2004, the Gambler's Help Southern website would receive about 100 unique visitors (repeat visitors count as 1 regardless of the number of times they visit) and about 300 total visits. In the month just past we had 927 unique visitors down from 970 unique visitors in November. In December we also past 2000 total visits for the month.

Whilst many articles have focused on our situation here in Victoria, and the majority of our visitors are from Australia we have had many visitors from around the world including the US, Canada, Ukraine, New Zealand, Singapore, Netherlands, Japan, Turkey, Indonesia, France, Mexico, Belgium, UK, Italy, Poland, Norway, Hong Kong, Colombia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Israel, China, Argentina, Czech Republic, Taiwan, Malaysia, Greece and Thailand.

Unfortunately due to the sensitivities of the material posted on this blog and the fact that I work for a government funded service, some may see that it is not appropriate for this blog to continue in this form. Personally I believe that the blog performed a community education role but this is not a view shared by all. This put significant pressure on the type of content presented and its form as well as whether the blog would continue to be effective. All in all these many unanswered questions have led me to decide that these resources would be better utilised in my other tasks as a community educator with Gambler's Help Southern.

I thank all my readers for their support and hope that you will continue to visit the Gambler's Help Website at www.ghsouthern.org.au where I hope to add relevant articles often.

Thank you to all those who have emailed me or left comments to posts - and those many readers out there that have enjoyed reading GuruBlog. I can continue to be contacted at guru@ghsouthern.org.au

Thanks again and remember - THINK OF WHAT YOU'RE REALLY GAMBLING WITH!

GG