February 10th, Steven, John and I are going to tell the whole Dogster, Inc. story - from beginning to now - at CommunityNext, a one day conference, February 10th at Stamford University.

CommunityNext is a first-time gathering that reminds me a lot more of http://webzine2005.com/ than it does Web2.0. I’ve even been helping the organizers because their interest and commitment to building and connecting communities is pure. They really want to get it right and they really want to cover the whole spectrum, not just what the press thinks is sexy or who is paying the most. Turns out they’ve got a diverse list of speakers of people from organzations and companies, I’ve been wanting to hear from.

Guy Kawasaki, Markus Frind of Plenty of Fish and the $900,000 Adsense check, Sean Suhl of SuicideGirls (a ground-breaker in passion-centric community), Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell of Threadless, Mike Jones of Userplace (our IM software), Hiten Shah of CrazyEgg (and our SEO guys), Doug Hirsch of Daily Strength (definitely one to know about), Premal Shah of Kiva.org and Fred Stutzman of ClaimId (an idea I applaud), and, heck I could go on and on … Check out the speaker page.

Another thing I really like about CommunityNext is that they’ve kept the price in a realistic range ($195.00) and put it on a Saturday so real web workers can go instead of just the marketing people. In fact, you can save $25 if you register Thursday and use this URL.

If you’re at all interested in community-oriented software definitely think about making it. Let us know you’re coming and we’ll bring ya a Dogster or Catster shirt ;>