SXSW just released a podcast of my panel entitled “Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses.” The panel scored a 4.34 out of 5 rating by attendees. Putting it 25th out of ~200 panels and events. The room was packed and the in-person reviews were very complimentary.

The panelists were great and it was a true pleasure getting to explore exactly how burgeoning web porjects are finding profits from their efforts. It’s not easy, but it’s out there.

You can listen to or download the audiocast now.

Here are the slides I showed for about the first 5 minutes of the presentation, you can view while listening to the audio.

Here’s the original panel description:

Whether your intent is to start a new business or simply make some money from existing projects, generating revenue from online services is rarely straightforward. Making money from your sites usually requires creativity, passionate understanding, and lots of trial and error. Whether your goal is to cover expenses of a side project, quit your day job or to cash-out and retire early, this panel will explore real-world success stories of making website into web companies.

Ted Rheingold Top Dog, Dogster Inc (Moderator)
Tara Hunt CoFounder & CMO, Citizen Agency
Gabe Rivera CEO, Techmeme
Shanalyn Victor Owner/Designer, Pixelgirl Shop
Ryan Carson Dir, Carson Systems

And kudos (again) to SXSW. Not only do they put on my favorite gathering of the year. They put a huge focus on improving it as much they can.

Exciting barks and meows! Dogster’s in the running for “The Next Web Award” in the Social category! We’re with some pretty impressive company in this category, so the saying “it’s an honor just to be nominated” certainly barks true.

The Next Web Awards acknowledges the future accomplishments of companies that will change the way we see, use and interact on the web! Voting is broken down in to eight categories. And the best part? The winners are picked by you! The people!

How do you have your say?
You don’t need to register
You don’t need to sign up
You just need to VOTE!
Vote for Dogster by following this link.

Plus, once you get to the site, you’ll see a bunch of really cool ways to options for increasing your voting power!

The winners will be announced at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam on June 1! Paws and Claws crossed!! And as always, tail wags for all the support.

Yesterday I moderated a panel entitled “Building Awesome Services with the Help of Happy Users” at the web2.0 expo. This is a topic that has fascinated me since Dogster’s inception and I’ve been wanting to explore how this has worked for other companies. So I invited Stewart Butterfield (Flickr co-founder), Joshua Schachter (Del.icio.us founder) and Biz Stone (Obvious Corp founder (maker of Twitter) and previous a Blogger employee). You can relive it thanks to the excellent transcript posted by Sean Bohan.

One facet that became very clear is that companies that are committing to involving their users (aka your customers … and don’t you forget it) uphold that relationship no matter how big they get. I expect a hallmark of good companies in the coming decades will be how directly tuned in company leadership is to their customers’ wants, wishes and feelings.

Stewart thought that after Craigslist, Flickr could be the biggest company in the world that manages open forums that anyone can discuss the product. More importantly Stewart still hangs out and communicates in them regularly. Joshua said they he still follows the user maillists and gets paged for important issues. Biz posts his phone number on the website, takes calls any time of day and says hello to anyone using their API. They all said they still talk with users they met in the earliest days and have never stoppped doing so. They hire from within their customer base and aspire to never let down their users no matter how big they get or who acquires them.

Here at Dogster & Catster HQ, I spend a lot of time in the forums, share my email with great frequency and communicate with members by phone, email and IM whenever they contact me. My partner John does much the same, and our Community Manager Randi and Customer Service Manager John D. spend all day working, listening and helping the community. Early on I found that we only run the site in name, we’re actually the guardian of it on behalf of our customers. The better Caretaker we can be for our community, the better our business will be.

Afterwards I was talking with Jason Goldman, also an ex-Blogger working on Twitter and we realized it does not necessarily have to be the CEO, but it should be a founder or well respected person with authority that is close to most all decision making. In fact he thought that in the near future the Community Evangelist role could be as common as the Project Manager position is today. (Think back 10 years, did you know many respected Project Managers)

A great example of the founder / customer evangelist has to be Craig Newmark of Craigslist. Instead of getting further and further from the userbase as Craigslist exploded, he moved himself closer and closer to it. As IT and management roles could be filled by new people he moved all his time to Customer Service. I doubt Craigslist could be so big worldwide, if the person who cared about it the most didn’t stay as close to their customers as possible.

[Photos by Scott Beale, LaughingSquid]

It’s rare that I say something like my above title, but really, get to the Web 2.0 Expo by hook or by crook and make it to my panel Tuesday at 2:40pm.

Here’s why. I’ve got Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Joshua Schachter (Del.icio.us) and Biz Stone (Xanga, Blogger, Twitter) all on one panel who are going to answer my probing and insightful questions about “Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users” and you should really be there.

Web development has become emancipated from the version/release cycle of shrink-wrapper software. Production cycles can now literally be as short as a day. Product can be released before there is even a company or name on it, which means users (aka YOUR CUSTOMERS) can be die hard enthusiasts before you’re even on a dedicated server. The wealth of communication tools the web offers also means that users can be just as involved in the development process as the people at the office.

Dogster was able to save what would have been hundreds of thousands in 1999 by bringing in our members to help with once high-budget items like Market Research, Q&A, and Recruitment. Stewart, Joshua, and Biz’s bis’es have all had massive engineering and product made entirely by happy users. This is all wonderful, but there’s plenty of hard reality this must bump up against and plenty of lessons learned. I can’t wait for it to start. This would actually be excellent fodder for a techie/mba crossover book. Any ghost writer reading this should give me a call email me … turns out I hate the phone.

Other must catch panels at web2.0 expo are:

• Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches
  Cal Henderson (Flickr, Yo!)
• Starting Up 2.0: Strategies for Pitching, Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup
  Jeff Clavier, Rob Hayes
• The People Formerly Known as the Audience
  Derek Powazek & Heather Champ
• Venture Capital 2.0: Bright Future or Broken Forever?
  Hornik, Arrington, Kopelman & more
• Web 2.0: Show Me the Money
  Jeremy Liew
• Reality Bites: The Future of Gaming + Virtual Worlds 2.0
  Ito, Koster, Wu, Sherman
  (Craig Sherman was an early friend of Dogster. Hi Craig ;)

See you there.

Team Dogster & Catster SF had a half-day team brainstorming and communication session last Thursday. The session was lead by professional meeting facilitator Newt Bailey. I have to say this was very worthwhile and probably way overdue.

 

Our focus was exploring new feature/product ideas and ways we could continue to get the paw out about Dogster and Catster. This discussion was fun and fast moving. We could have spent days on this topic. It was very rewarding to break out of our routines and have our very creative team reach for the stars. Everyone now has a profound understanding of our community, our services and it’s great osee how enthusiastic we all are about the future possibilities.

We now have a whole wall of our office covered with large-sized Post-It notes chock full of ideas. It is going to be difficult to sift through all of the ideas and prioritize them on the product roadmap, but we collectively determined which we thought the single most important items were and we associated action items to each of them. We will of course need to align the business strategy with the new ideas, but I think everyone walked away with deep insights into our company and where our best path forward lies. Since we formally opened up this process to the team in this session, it will be important to communicate to the team the reasons why something gets prioritized on our product roadmap before something else.

We also took the time to collectively discuss our corporate environment and communication. Newt, very perceptively, picked up on our need to discuss some of these issues. Some of the issues were simple and can be solved easily, such as improving our kitchen. Other were complex like setting up better processes for overall team communication. I cannot articulate how important I feel this part of the session was. Newt has a great demeanor and creates an atmosphere where people can speak their minds without feeling inhibited, intimidated or judged. Hearing the needs of the team and defining steps that we can take that day to improve our work experience and then doing them have already paid off. The atmosphere and excitement in the office the past few days has been noticeably improved and a lot more fun.

I’d like to end this post with two recommendations. First, don’t put off having these kind of sessions with your team and have them for at least a day (we did a half day and it was too short). Second, Newt Bailey is an excellent person for these types of things. Spend an hour talking to him a few days before the session and he will tailor the session to fit the needs and personality of your team. He also does personal coaching as well. You can learn more about him or contact him directly. Tell him Dogster sent ya ;>

Would you like to make sure that the minute any dog or cat food sold in the U.S. is found to be contaminated or is hurting pets in any way?

Then subscribe to you our Pet Food Recall RSS feed.

Our expert Dog Blogger Joy Ward will make sure any new FDA or voluntary recall will be in front of your eyes immediately. If feeds are not your thing then you can always find the newest information by going to the Dog Blog Recall Homepage at http://dogblog.dogster.com/category/recalls

The latest disaster of the contaminated food coming from overseas, being processed by Menu Food in Canada and sold to over 60 brands of pet food has truly shocked us. The limited oversight and requirements placed on any pet food maker is so poor that it’s crucial to stay in the know.

So we created a feed that will only display entries to you if the content is related to pet food recall information. This way there is no need to get to our homepage or wait for cable news to pick up the story. Our network of volunteers are everywhere and we round up and distribute pet-related news faster then any single outlet.

Join the feed at any time. The permanently feed URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dogster/pet_food_recall

The permanently recall homepage is: http://dogblog.dogster.com/category/recalls

In March of 2004, Dogster.com was two monthly old, with 10,000 registered members and 50 incoming emails a day. Creating a place where anyone could make a stylish webpage for their dog really hit a nerve, one that went much deeper then I ever imagined. Once Wired, the Chron and CNN picked it up, however, I started getting some knee-jerk backlash from any talking webhead who took note of it. Most, it felt, relished the change to take some pot shots about sock-puppets, hamstersters, and/or friendster jabs, without having even created an account. Many just assumed they were the only ones who had worked through the roaring 90s and lived to tell of it.

Then one day an internet writer, Stowe Boyd, wrote a site review that described it for what it was as something that wasn’t for everyone, but was likely pretty special for it’s users. I sent him an email saying “thanks for getting it” and it’s been a very engaging friendship since then. Nothing is taken for granted with Stowe and he’s always taking the time to envision what current developments will mean today, in 6 months and in 2 years.

Stowe has been following technical and techno-cultural trends for years - you currently can read him daily at /Message. You’ll also be able to follow him from his new audio program entitled /Talkshow. I was honored when he asked me to be his inaugaral guest. We’ve got such a history watching so much happen over the last three years and comparing notes all along the way, I’m looking forward to going deep with somewho who truly get’s it ;>

Tune in live for the inaugural show Thursday April 12th at 10:30am PST, 1:30pm EST.

Today Dogster welcomed Lola Duff—the charming Chihuahua belonging to actress, pop star and dog-lover extraordinaire Hilary Duff—to our community.

Hilary’s very well known for her doggie devotion. She’s been on the cover of mostly every dog-focused magazine out there. She’s big in to animal rescue and adoption. In fact, Hilary rescued Lola while she was on tour in Florida—and the two have been inseparable ever since.

“Lola is the best, and she has such a great personality. I am excited that she is part of the Dogster community so people will get to know her, and she’ll be able to get to know all the other top dogs out there,” said Hilary.

Lola’s already dove paws-first in to the Dogster community. In fact, she’s started her own group: “Lola’s Pooch Posse.” The group is open to all Dogster members and will help Lola stay nose-to-nose with all of her new BFFs.

Lola’s profile is up and active on the site. Check it out here, and be sure to give her a big Dogster WOOF of welcome! We’re happy to have her running around and enjoying all the dog love here at Dogster!

Late last year we carefully migrated over 95% of our URLs from id-oriented query-strings to keyword-rich, descriptive directory-style URLs. It’s a pain in the bum, but benefits both our users and search engine spiders as it offers memorable URLs that offer precise visibility into each page’s cotent. We also improved up our page titles, descriptions, and body content to make the pages easier to index and present in results.

After I got over the heart-attack of having all results disappear from search results until Google was able to return a second time and confirm our changes we’re permanent, I pleasantly watched many of our top keywords get back to first page rankings, and many of our lesser keywords push far ahead into top-20 and top-30 placements.

But dear Google, you keep losing our ‘dog.’ For 8 long weeks googling the term ‘dog’ did not return a www.dogster.com listing in the top 200. Then on March 7th I noticed we ranked 126th for ‘dog’ and then two weeks later on March 26th dogster.com we ranked 17th. I mistakenly thought our lost dog was found for good. Nope. It’s just a week later and our site has hardly changed and you won’t find Dogster.com when searching for ‘dog’ until the 450th result … and then it’s for a subdomain, dogblog.dogster.com.

The glaringness of the problem became clear last night when I saw via Google’s Webmaster tools (which are excellent and quite evolved) that Google considers ‘dog’ the second most common term on our site. It’s 3 above ‘dogs,’ a term for which we rank ninth overall on a Google search. Heck when I search for ‘dog’ just within dogster.com, Google finds 738,000 matching pages.

So dear Google why are you dogging us so heard about ‘dog’. Why are you being a complete dog about it? Can you throw this dog a bone and fix this?