Phuket to the world: Major Web forum zeros in

The agreement results in the birth of the Phuket Gazette/ThaiVisa Forum, a collection of thousands of pages of reader knowledge and observations on just about every aspect of life in Phuket.

The Gazette endows the venture with rich, dynamic news content, major Web visitor statistics from its online newspaper, and a powerful Google ranking, while ThaiVisa provides the technology and a massive membership base to ensure continued growth in readership participation.

"We've been told for years that we should have a forum, that our hard-copy letters to the editor and Issues & Answers columns, while interactive, are simply too slow to satisfy the market's lust for "see-it, get-it now", said John Magee, publisher of the Gazette. "But we've not had the resources to set up our own Web board, so working together with ThaiVisa and The Nation on this seemed like a natural," he added.

The ThaiVisa.Com Expat Forum, of which the Phuket Forum is a part, has, as of this morning, 75,804 registered members. Launched in 2002, the forum now enjoys about 25,000 unique visitors a day, and serves up more than four million pages per month. The pages carry close to 3 million individual posts contributed by readers with an interest in Thailand.

"We are happy to be working with the Gazette in the Phuket Forum. It's a newspaper with a long history of credibility and substance, and the Gazette Online has an extremely strong presence in the major search engines, particularly Google. Working together with the Gazette on a trial basis over the past month has already resulted in a major increase in visits to our Phuket Forum, a trend which we expect to continue," says Barry Main, marketing director of ThaiVisa.Com.

"We've brought a Phuket news icon into our pages, and the opportunities for expansion of the partnership into other areas - classified advertising, for example - are looking pretty good," he added. 

The Phuket Gazette/ThaiVisa.Com forum is at http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Phuket-Forum-f31.html