Welcome to the Dog-o-sphere
Infamous for his shoe-thieving, pants-biting, garbage-eating habits, it wasn’t long after introducing my pug, Gutterball to LaunchSquad that several coworkers suggested I blog about his notoriously naughty behavior. Who wouldn’t want to read about a dog unscrewing an airtight canister and eating the enclosed pound of puppy kibble at 5 a.m., or taking the lids off two dozen Poland Springs bottles without spilling a drop, only to watch me dump the entire pallet onto my pants the next morning?
Before devoting my time to any extensive dog-blogging efforts, I decided to do a small audience study. What kind of audience is there for crazed pet owners and their crazy pets? Would I be on the same level as the guy whose dog has matching pajamas, or the woman who refers to her canine as her first-born child? Is there a home on the Internet for those of us who simply like to boast of their pets’ abilities to sit, fetch, and wreak havoc on the general population of San Francisco?
I discovered rather quickly that there’s a stronger niche on the web for the average pet owner than one might expect. In fact, social “petworking” has been taking the Internet by storm. It began with the advent of Dogster in January 2004, in the then-fresh wake of Friendster, Myspace and Facebook. The pet-centric networking site is an online forum where dogs like Max Benkelman, a Schnauzer from Nebraska, can gripe about his brother Gus chewing on his ears, while Max’s owners and others can trade tips on doggie daycare and flea control.
Social networks prosper because they are a platform for folks to engage and interact. Creating one around a popular “vertical market” such as canines has proved a surefire way to bring people together. In its first three months, Dogster’s subscriber profiles grew from 100 to 8,000, and nearly four years later, it has over 300,000 subscribers worldwide.
In light of Dogster’s success, multiple social petworking sites and an infinite number of pet-specific blogs have cropped up across the Net. This week alone, two dog networking sites launched. MyPetVideos.TV, a user-generated community for people to share home videos of their pets, announced on Monday, boasting such treasures as a cat playing Whack-a-Mole. Meanwhile, actress Glenn Close and husband David Shaw founded FetchDog on Tuesday, which offers advice, a shopping catalog and a social network for dog owners to share information, photos and stories about their pets.
Though petcentric blogs don’t have an overwhelming readership in the blogosphere, there are a lot of them, and it’s clear that dogs maintain a solid position in the world of Web 2.0. According to the 2007-2008 National Pet Owners Survey, Americans alone owned 74.8 million dogs in 2006, and over 23% get information about their dogs online. Truly, dogs and our love of them is an unstoppable force, even on the Web.
It’s good to know that while not everyone will be flocking to read daily updates on the life of just another pug, there is still a place out there for Gutterball and his much-deserved shot at international infamy. He hasn’t spent the last four hours single handedly dismantling my couch in vain. Now it’s just time for me to start writing about it, and finally throw him a bone. Maybe then he’ll stop gnawing on the microfiber.