An ongoing dialogue on HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases,
August 22nd, 2025
On the Internet, Nobody Read My First Blog
Not the site’s banner, but you get the point. (AI generated.)
In 2007, during the boom in online blogging, and right before the economy crashed, a medical education company contacted me and three other ID doctors to write a blog about HIV. The pitch was irresistible — write something about HIV on a regular basis (they didn’t say what), and we’ll promote it widely. Oh, and you’ll get paid!
The lead from the company certainly conveyed enthusiasm. He made the inevitable “viral” pun (ha ha, we all chuckled politely), and unveiled a clever name. It had “expansion potential,” he said: We’ll start with this one on HIV, but later we could launch one on Oncology, Dermatology, Hirudotherapy*.
(*Leach therapy — so not really that.)
He also mentioned how much interest he’d already received from the various companies that developed HIV treatments. Indeed, they planned to sell ads once the internet traffic came pouring in. It was all very promising.
I enthusiastically signed up. Then I wrote a few pieces, none of them in hindsight very good, and sent them to the person responsible for posting them online.
It launched in the spring of 2007, including an inaugural piece of mine called “Some Non-Scientific Thoughts on CROI” where I complained about CROI holding its opening night during the Academy Awards — in Los Angeles, no less. (Yes, they did that.)
Then I waited for the flood of insightful comments. You know, Web 2.0.
The response?
It got worse from there. Reader engagement went from sparse to nonexistent. The site was glitchy, forcing people to reset their passwords for no apparent reason. You can only clear your browser cache so many times before bolting. Even in 2007, patience for that kind of frustration was in short supply.
And the design of the site? It typified the overall look of the early-ish internet — low resolution, bad colors, possibly done with an open-access graphics program by someone’s 8th grader. You want pop-up windows? We’ve got pop-up windows!
The combination of weak content (mine!) and technical obstacles hardly created the kind of user experience to encourage participation. The site closed up shop in less than a year, a much less famous failure than Lehman Brothers, which shared a similar fate and termination date.
But despite the false start, I’m grateful to the organizers for their optimism and for getting me going — you have to start somewhere. That was the lesson I learned in hindsight. It won’t always be a success, but it’s worth putting the words on the page, even if you later cringe at the whole effort.
That’s true for any creative pursuit — painting, music, pottery, bonsai tree cultivation. False starts are still starts, cringeworthy though they may be.
Most importantly, when the NEJM Journal Watch editor Matt O’Rourke considered expanding the Journal Watch content to include blogs, I had some experience with the medium, and could send him some of my posts — now revised, reworked, and improved, of course!
(Revision is an amazing thing. Another lesson learned.)
Would I have been able to launch this effort without that initial experience? Unlikely.
And as a reminder that even the most enduring internet creations start somewhere, here’s Peter Steiner talking about his own legendary contribution to world humor — the brilliant, timeless cartoon “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
It started just another sketch in a pile of many, and was hardly his first try.
One Response to “On the Internet, Nobody Read My First Blog”
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Paul E. Sax, MD
Contributing Editor
NEJM Journal Watch
Infectious Diseases
Biography | Disclosures | Summaries
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Thanks for sharing this early history of the blog! The video made me think of this very funny cartoon.
https://shorturl.at/Sq0TR