Me: PBFluids turns 10 years old this month.
Wife: You going to throw a party?
Me: No, but I’m going to write a blog post.
May 30, 2008, my first post at PBFluids.
Ten years. That’s a long time in career. At the speed of social media, it’s an epoch.
Defining moments from PBFluids’ first 10 years
The Beginning
When I started PBFluids, the there were two other nephrology blogs out there, Joshua Schwimmer’s Kidney Notes (March 7, 2005!) and Nathan Hellman’s Renal Fellow Network (Nate started his 5 weeks before PBFluids). Comparing PBFluids to Renal Fellow Network feels a bit like saying between me and Michael Jordan we have 6 NBA championships. But nonetheless, ten years ago we were the first few pebbles which started rolling down this mountain which has become an avalanche of online nephrology education.
Though there was Nathan and Schwimmer, and a year later Kenar (December 7, 2009, talk about a day that will live in infamy) and Tejas (NephOnDemand is a lot different today than it was in the early days), we were all pretty independent. I rarely interacted with them and they rarely interacted with me. I read their stuff and was influenced by what they were doing, but blogging was largely a solo affair. Now every post I write is either inspired by an interaction on Twitter; vetted, reviewed and proofed on Twitter; or has Twitter generated follow-up. The blog and the #NephTwitter community are inseparable.
At Kidney Week 2008 (the first after launching PBFluids) I live blogged some of the lecturers. Essentially I was live tweeting, but with Blogger. The results were not pretty (see this, and this, and this). I knew what I wanted to do, but Blogger was the wrong tool. I joined Twitter a month later.
exploring twitter
— Joel M. Topf, MD FACP (@kidney_boy) December 12, 2008
For the first two years on Twitter I barely used it. This was largely due to the lack of a community online. It wasn’t until 2011 that #NephTwitter started to become a thing. The blog was important, but Twitter allowed for the interactivity and collaboration that no other platform could provide. Twitter was the essential trigger for nephrology’s social media awakening.
Turning the microphone on.
In October of 2008, 5 months after starting PBFluids, Dr. Schwimmer linked to my blog. Getting a link from KidneyNotes turned the microphone on. It turned the blog from an ego project with an audience of one into a (very) limited publishing platform. Joshua made me a public physician.
The Smartphone Wars
PBFluids is older than the App store. So a lot of early posts looked at smart phones and how they were going changing medicine. At first it was iPhone vs Blackberry and soon after that, iPhone vs Android (I might have been premature when I called the results of this one).
In March of 2009 I had my first breakout post that received real traffic. It was a review of medical calculators for the iPhone. Don’t miss the follow-up post on MedCalc, which is still my go to medical calculator.
Best story of the blog
October 2010: ‘Meeting’ Margaret Atwood on Twitter.
The story was so cool it got picked up by the Guardian. If you ever wanted to know happens to traffic to your personal website when a post you wrote gets covered by The Guardian, take a gander:
The Madness begins
In March of 2012 I made this video for World Kidney Day.
I wanted to recreate the spirit of Shit Nephrologists Say for the following World Kidney Day. In February of 2013, Matt and I were brainstorming ideas and NephMadness was conceived.
My favorite line from that post:
I had my partners and fellows fill out brackets today. They all had a lot of fun doing it. There is something light and joyful pitting these heavy topics against each other in totally absurd ways. Take a crack at it, have fun.
Seeing Twitter nephrology get into NephMadness and care about it made me understand what was possible with FOAMed. It made me see that we could change medical education so it was woven into your online-life. We could make medical education feel less like the lonely library on a Friday night and more like a raucous but productive study group with your med school friends. It could connect nephrologists so that we could learn together, be smarter together, be stronger together, and have fun together.
The DreamRCT flash in the pan
In a fit of insanity I tried to shoe horn DreamRCT between the new year and NephMadness. Here was my entry in the first contest.
#DreamRCT: Prove the uric acid-CKD connection and win Richard Johnson a Nobel
The following year we moved it to the fall and partnered with MedPage Today. We had a great panel of judges and amazing entries. The reason there was not a year three of DreamRCT was not due to lack of great content. DreamRCT was a victim of trying to do this social media education in the cracks between clinic and rounds. Sometimes there are just not enough h=nights or weekend.
Here is my entry for DreamRCT 2: An EBM take on one of the fundamental problems with hyponatremia.
Please fund my #DreamRCT, it is just embarrassing how little evidence is found in hyponatremia
The second DreamRCT was also the capstone project of the first year of the NSMC. Four of the sixteen studies in DreamRCT 2 were written by our first four interns. Looking at the list of DreamRCTs it is amazing how many questions they brought up that are still taxing us. I particularly loved Scherly’s MIND study and Chi Chu’s RCT on contrast nephropathy.
NSMC
Speaking of the NSMC, it was also was launched on PBFluids:
NephJC
Actually it was launched on NephJC.com, but NephJC.com itself was launched here:
While writing this post I came across a lot of PBFluids deep cuts that I haven’t thought of for years. A few gems:
Area Codes, RTAs, and Amphetamine. This is what Twitter is like.
Another Twitter collaboration that turned into a fun post
In the last year Twitter has really shake off many of the ancillary companies and services that grew-up around it to support the service. FavStar going away in a few weeks. Storify is gone. We have seen TweetChat and TChat.io lose so much functionality to be unusable. But the blog marches on. After a decade of change and innovation in the social media space there is still room for the blog. And more importantl,y the blog, with its dependence on simple HTML, the portability of its data, and its ability to reform itself (see my transition from Blogger to WordPress this year), has a durability that is valuable in Medical Education. I may not be publishing new content to PBFluids in 10 years, but the work that is here, will remain.
Happy Birthday PBFluids, it’s been a great ride.