Blue Day 2008 - October 10

• @oliyoung lol well we can hope #

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Just a short post to thank everyone for their support over the last few weeks getting the word out about Depression and Anxiety and of course Blue Day 2008. There are still a few things to wrap up but I would say the event has been a great success. While we did not get thousands of post my objective of stimulating discussion and awareness was met. I have shut down user registration as the site is now starting to get spammers registering.

Now for a quick summary on what took place:

• Meetups all over Australia
• Massive support for Blue Day on Twitter with blue avatars, not just in Australia but globally
• Lots of blog posts both on this site and others
• A Second Life event
• The biggest success was the discussion and honest I found amongst the tech & social media community in Australia. So many people have been impacted by either depression or anxiety

Once again thanks to everyone’s support.

• thank you to everyone that supported #blueday2008 #

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• reviewing the outcomes of #blueday2008 #
• @PeterBlackQUT thanks, it seems to have been a success #

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• another #blueday2008 post on Chronic Fatigue syndrome combined with anxiety and depression http://is.gd/3NyZ #
• a very personal blog post for #blueday2008 http://is.gd/3NEm #
• win a book as part of #blueday2008 visit http://is.gd/3NGN #
• Some music to listen to if you are feeling blue #blueday2008 http://is.gd/3NHe #
• one aspect of depression not fully understood is self harm, read a personal account http://is.gd/3NIJ #blueday2008 #
• reminder #blueday2008 events on today; check out the one in SecondLife http://is.gd/3NLG from 6pm AEST #
• Retweeting @johnlacey: @blueday2008 — My Blue Day 2008 Blog post: http://blog.johnlacey.net/blue-day-2008/ #
• another #blueday2008 post http://tinyurl.com/4mv8qa #
• some great resources for #blueday2008 http://freshchat.com.au/blue-day-2008/ #
• @stilgherrian but we still love & support you no matter what #
• another personal insight into depression & anxiety http://tinyurl.com/53uxla #blueday2008 #
• The impact of depression untreated on the ones around you http://is.gd/3OcK #blueday2008 #
• a goo dpost detailing some fo the symptoms of depression http://tinyurl.com/3sfh6x #blueday2008 #

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While today is Blue Day 2008, where the Australian tech & social media community are raising the awareness of depression & anxiety, we need to remember that we still live in a privileged part of the world. Most of us will never experience poverty in the real sense such as the way people in Darfur are at the moment. Unfortunately this does not mean people don’t experience poverty in Australia, in fact people can end up on the poverty line, or even below it, as an outcome of depression.

Remember over 1 million Australia adults and 100,000 youth live with depression each year, on average, 20% of people will experience depression at least once in their life; 1 in 4 females and 1 in 6 males. While experiencing depression many people are unable to function within what we casually call normal society, sometimes they end up without any means of financially support themselves or their family.

The inability to financially support oneself can result in them living in poverty. Not only that, these people can be living next door to you, not a faceless individual in another country. Poverty and depression together can create are terrible cycle with one feeding off the other and can send an otherwise intelligent & well functioning person over the edge.

This leads me to Blog Action Day and Learn About Poverty.

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

This year Blog Action Day is focusing on poverty, which brings me to Learn About Poverty a blog where World Vision has brought together their resources for Blog Action Day.

To help generate excitement for Blog Action Day, World Vision and several other Australian organisations are running a competition to encourage more people to post about poverty. So I encourage you all once you have written you post on depression, pull one together for poverty.

• welcome to blue day! Remeber wear something blue, change your avatar, write a blog post raise awareness #
• Remember to tage your blog posts blueday2008, your tweets #blueday2008 & grab a avatar http://is.gd/3mwO #
• @zuzu Good luck with the tooth extraction! #
• planning RT-athon from 9am AEST, sorry in advance to @fulltimecasual #blueday2008 #
• @nwjerseyliz thanks for the retweet, hope your friday is good when you get to it #
• A thoughtful poem from someone who has had depression http://is.gd/3NoE #blueday2008 #
• lol we killed the site #
• post on using web 2.0 tools to help with depression & anxiety http://is.gd/3Nqp #blueday2008 #

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• completely amazed at the support for #blueday2008, seeing blog posts from Singapore, Hungary & blue avatars from all sorts of countries #
• @Fifikins don’t pick on them, just raise their awareness that depression and anxiety are not things to hide from #
• @mhawkins1970 i certainly hope so, what can we do to get the word out more? #
• @btub are you guys running a blue day event? if so let us know so we can promote it #
• @satub have you got information on your blue day event? #
• @MattHooper just wondering if you are turning blue for #blueday2008?? #
• @silkcharm will you be trading your pink for blue?? #
• @ninjamoeba a blue comic strip would be fantastic!! #
• @lozzz are you going to the sydney event on friday night? #
• @stub any chance of getting some advertising on your feed for friday’s meetup?? #
• @firstdogonmoon any chance of a #blueday2008 comic for friday?? #
• @lozzz cool!! like your blue avatar #
• @cameronreilly will we be seeing a special #blueday2008 edition of g’dayworld?? #
• @bronwen @cameronreilly @plasmaegg unfortunately until people seek help it is very hard to help them. many people don’t due to the stigma #
• @cameronreilly ahhh yes not the best topic for a birthday, but I hear the 30’s are the new 20’s, so really you will be 28 #
• @cameronreilly agree everyone needs to look, listen and talk about it #
• ok folks we are at 140 followers, let’s get the message out further & break 200, #blueday2008 #
• @JonoH go blue & join us for #blueday2008 on friday #
• @gen_n go blue & join us for #blueday2008 on friday #
• @gminks #blueday2008 is about raising awareness of depression and anxiety within society, grab an avatar http://blueday2008.org/?page_id=31 #
• @ElectricFirefly looking very good there with 40% extra blueness #blueday2008 #
• @kcarruthers awesome, hope you guys have a great night #blueday2008 #

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• lots of blue avatars appearing across the Oz Twitter users, join in for eith the month or just on this Friday World Mental Health Day #
• also remember if you are blogging about ADA tag it with blueday2008 #
• we have 91 followers for @blueday2008, lets see if we can get it over 100 today #blueday2008 #
• @crispynoodles very cool postcards #
• RT @crispynoodles @blueday2008 This week is Mental Health Week. Postcard: http://tinyurl.com/4gvovf, http://tinyurl.com/4nkvml #
• we now have 101 followers, next stop 200. also getting reports the for some twitter is a sea of blue #blueday2008 #
• @Warlach looking good for #blueday2008 #
• @artywah assume ever post will be made live, unless it is spam, or harassing, etc, your’s is now live #
• @mfubib great!! once i get the aggregation going tomorrow we will have a single place to consolidate all tagged posts #
• @kitrona thanks, no I didn’t but I will look to fix it now #
• remember if you don’t have a blog or want to be anonymous you can write your #bueday2008 post at http://blueday2008.org #

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