There has been no shortage of intriguing topics to write about over the past year. As I’ve said before, marketers are smart, and we consumers need to learn how to outsmart them. Part of that learning, of course, involves just becoming more savvy about how things work out there in the world of marketing. This year, a first for me: threatened legal action by the mega-law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom who took exception to seeing their client’s name mentioned here.*
As one of my readers commented on the threatened lawsuit:
“Your blog is only one year old, and you know you’ve successfully hit some nerves if Dr. XXXX needs to muzzle your observations already. Congratulations!”
I absolutely love my WordPress stats page here on The Nag! It’s a behind-the-scenes daily web tool that lets me monitor which articles are being read most often, which external links are being clicked while those articles are read, and even what search words or phrases have been typed into Google to land here in the first place. It’s fascinating! For example, one of my top four online referrers in 2010 was the University of Connecticut, who apparently have my site listed on a midterm exam required reading list in the Commerce faculty. The stats helper monkeys at WordPress tell me that if this blog were the Taj Mahal, it would take four days for The Nag’s 36,000 visitors this year to see it! In 2010, I uploaded 159 pictures, and wrote 90 new articles, growing the total archive of The Nag to 146 posts.
Happy New Year to all my fellow Nags, to those of you who choose to share what you like here with friends, colleagues and families, and particularly to my loyal readers who follow The Nag via RSS feed, on Twitter, or via email subscription. Now here’s our Top 10 List of the most widely read Nags for 2010:
1. Microwave popcorn: (still) bad for you
2. Lipitor – and nine other blockbuster drugs that are falling off the ‘patent cliff’ this year.
3. “We never imagined people would think of osteopenia as a disease”
4. Adidas vs Nike: the World Cup battle of the brands
5. ‘Extreme exam anxiety’ – disability or excuse?
6. When doctors go retail: is it okay to sell products? *
7. Why the Olympics are bad business
8. Does the medical profession need to wean itself off the ‘pervasive dependence on Big Pharma money?
9. The haunting of medical journals: how ghostwriting sold hormone replacement therapy
The Ethical Nag 
Congratulations! LOVE this Top 10 list which I have forwarded to colleagues – every single topic listed makes for outstanding water cooler debate material, and I anticipate lively debate come Monday morning at work. Keep up the good work but try to avoid those big law firms in 2011, right?
Dr. Bob I took your idea to heart and brought copies of these Top Ten articles to my team at work on the nite shift (normally a deadly quiet stretch of endless work hours). Great solution and lots of animated discussion pro and con each night. Plus we learned a lot about each other’s viewpoints on a wide variety of topics, even some opinions that we didn’t know before tho this team has been working together since 91.
Love this list – some of these I had already read, but other articles I had missed entirely. Thx for the reminder. It’s also interesting to see which topics are most popular, which can help steer you in choosing future topics for greatest readership. Keep up the good work in 2011……