SELECT great(Database Consulting) FROM ‘Dogster, Inc’

For most of the past year we have had the pleasure of having one of the best DBA’s in the business working with us at Dogster and Catster, Laine Campbell. I have known Laine since 2000 when she joined Travelocity as a Senior DBA and we have worked together off and on since then. Recently, she has been putting more effort into developing her consulting business and Dogster is very grateful that she did.

Along with Greg, our Director of Systems, Laine has been a key contributor to our success in scaling our websites to their current levels of usage and beyond. Her technical database skills exceed any other DBA’s I have worked with but what is really great about Laine is her ability to think strategically and to understand your business requirements. Many DBA’s I have known in the past have been quite righteous on how to proceed in solving a certain problem. They believe there is a “right” way and any other path is foolish. This doesn’t always work at a start-up where resources and time-to-market issues are often at play. Laine is great at offering multiple database strategies and being open to the fact that sometimes a fix has to be fast and perhaps not ideal. Don’t get me wrong… she will be sure to let you know the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches in question. This goes right along with the fact that she is a great communicator as well as having a really strong understanding of systems and databases.

So, if you are a start-up that needs some database help but can’t afford a full time DBA or if you are a mature company that needs some pro insights into your database situation, we highly recommend Laine. Yay! Laine!

http://www.palominodb.com/

Wow, are our tails wagging with excitement! Dogster (and our kitty site Catster) are finalists in CNET’s Webware 100 award in the Community category!

And we love to win if for no other reason than to thanks each and every member of our community! Without them, we’re a dog without a bone!

Voting is open thru June 11th. Just click below to cast your vote for the most furbulous site on the web.

The CNET Webware 100 awards give kudos to the best web applications out there. And the winners are chosen by the public–the folks that use and peruse the internet every day.

People like you!

The winners will be announced on June 18th. Paws and tails crossed. And as always, thanks for your support! WOOF!

Here they are, links to the Dogster and Catster Facebook applications

• Dogster Rescue: Display adoptable dogs! (browse & install)
• Dogster Cute: Display any dogs you want! (browse & install)
• Catster Rescue: Display adoptable cats! (browse & install)
• Catster Cute: Display any cats you want (browse & install)

People really liked our Dogster and Catster applications for Facebook. It was great getting to show them off. See our announcement entry for more details.

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

This afternoon Dogster and Catster unveiled new applications that display our dogs and cats directly on Facebook profile pages by using the Facebook Platform.

We were invited—as were other developers and companies—to participate in an initiative that allowed Dogster and Catster to build applications that would be deeply integrated in to the Facebook website. And today we got to demo our two applications.

The Facebook Platform, called F8, is a very significant development and you should take the time to learn what it means.

And wow, what an event. Great energy, great people and, we’re happy to say, we were in some great company…Amazon, Microsoft, Slide, and Hot or Not, just to name a few.

The utility that enabled us to do this, called Facebook Platform, provided a rich set of tools and online services to build applications that allows us access to Facebook’s more than 24 million active users.

Using this Platform, we developed a pair of versatile applications configured for both the Dogster and Catster properties—allowing animal lovers on Facebook to proudly tailor their space with eye-catching and personalized images focused around their love of dogs and cats.

• The Rescue Application allows Facebook users to feature photos of adoptable pets in pounds and shelters around the country that are in need of a good home.
• The Cute Application allows a user to showcase photos of the cutest dogs and cats on the web right on their Facebook page.

You can learn more and download the Application for Dogster here, and for Catster here,

We’ve been waiting for the right partner to share our content with and Facebook is it. Like Dogster and Catster, Facebook is a safe, fun, informative community environment. Giving people the ability to share what they are most passionate about is a perfect combination. Looks for more uses of our API coming to more websites near you soon!

Google’s clear-as-mud requirement that paid links on a page must have the rel=nofollow attribute, is really annoying me. There is a very consistent sentiment that Google will down rank a web page if it determines that links on that page were paid to be there. Your options for indicating to google that they should not credit your page’s “authority” to that link is by adding a rel=nofollow in the href tag or to redirect links through a local subdirectory that has a nofollow status in a robots.txt file.

The problem is it’s been two years since this requirement dribbled out yet it’s still unclear what is considered wong and what is considered an appropriate fix. Is it just text ads? (if so why does AdSense not ad rel=nofollow to their text ads) Is it paid banner ads? Is it sponsor links? Is it barter partnership links, is it linking to other owned domains? I’m exaggerating a little here, but mostly because the definition of a paid link can be very very broad and Google has made no effort in 2 years to clarify their original vague position.

I’m in the process of modifying our phpAdsNew code to add rel=nofollow tag to our banner ad hotlinks. (for tips, see below). I see lots of concern about this in webmaster forums. I’ve heard Kevin Burton of TailRank mention it the last three times I’ve spoken with him, I see lots of blog entries, lots of references to quips from Google’s Matt Cutts, but I still can say very little with confidence about how important or overblown this is. I do agree that what we are left with is FUD and it’s rather insulting. I know their goal is to ferret out scammers, link brothels and deceptive advertisers, but the baby is going out with the bath water on this one.

Anyone have any advice or real first-hand knowledge?

If anyone wants to know how to add nofollows to their phpAdsNew banners add the following line around line 366 of /libraries/lib-view-main.inc.php

$outputbuffer = preg_replace("/>a href/i", ">a rel='nofollow' href", $outputbuffer);

Place it immediately above the lines:

// Return banner
return( array('html' => $outputbuffer,

We’ve had a lot of firsts here at Dogster, and here’s another worth barking about: Kevin Gessino-Kraft—Dogster’s first ever sponsored pro-athlete!

Some of you may know Kevin as Loki’s dad. But there’s more to the man behind the pooch. He’s also a Professional Golfer and a player in the Nationwide Tour–which is the second level for the PGA. (It’s also the second largest golf tour in the U.S.)

When Kevin takes to the greens, Dogster’s right there with him…on his bag, anyway. Our Dogster logo emblazes his golf bag.

Plus he tells us that a lot of people ask him about us between shots, so he’s also our un-official spokesman for the putt-loving set.

And while we won’t get too in-depth on his ranking and playing status, we will say that we’re all for anyone that hits balls that we can chase after. And bow-WOW can he hit ‘em far!

Anywoof, Kevin and his wife Heather were in the Bay Area last month for a possible tournament and we jumped at the chance to have him come in and meet everyone.

As you can see, they were a hit with the humans as well as our four-legged office mates.

We’ll keep you posted on Kevin’s tour progress. As far as Dogster’s concerned, he’s always a hole-in-one! WOOF!

Conference season is heating up and Dogster, Inc will be hitting the circuit. I’ve been invited to speak at the following events in the coming months. Reboot is already sold out, but let me know if you’ll be at any of these event.
 
Reboot 9

Copenhagen, Denmark, May 30 & June 1
“Reboot is the European meetup for the practical visionaries who are building tomorrow one little step at a time, using new models for creation and organization in a world where the only entry barrier is passion.” Don’t doubt I’m not looking forward to this one.
 
DealMaker: Strategy Series

Menlo Park, CA, June 6
The topic is “Which Comes First - Eyeballs or Revenues?” and I’ll be speaking along side the CEO’s of RockYou, VideoEgg and a Principal of BlueRun Ventures. Why do I think I’ll be the only one truthfully answering revenue?
 
The Social Networking Conference

San Francisco, CA, July 28-29th
This conference has a distinctly global focus and I’m looking forward to the diversity of companies that will be gathering to confer upon the world-wide status of technology-enabled communication and communities.

Thanks to Cartoon Bank I get a pet-related New Yorker cartoon in the inbox each. Most I quickly delete.

Some I post to our company blog.

(I wonder if I’ll get a cease and desist for displaying this image without permission even though I am advertising their service.. The image is copyrighted, so they would be right, but…. )

There were three blog entries that caught my attention today. Both indicate to me that the industry as a whole has not only woken up to the massive potential of passion-centric communities (you may call them vertical communities or niche communities), but how it is embracing them with open arms.

The first is a very insightful post by Yahoo! EVP Jeff Weiner, Mission as Strategy, outlining the results of Yahoo’s recent re-org and their overarching strategy to “leverage our assets to build the most relevant, comprehensive, dynamic, and open repository of knowledge and content on the Web.” He boils it down to a single mission statement “To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.”

At Dogster and Catster, connecting people with common passions online has always been the heart of what we do from day one. It’s been rewarding and brought us great success. Yahoo has hundreds of properties and hundreds of millions of users: focusing on connecting those people with their passions and interests deeper then anyone else can offer is, in my humble opinion, the most powerful strategic decision they could make. While Google and Microsoft battle it out for the heart of the corporate software market and while incredibly powerful search inexorably becomes a commodity, Yahoo can be a giant passion center neither can touch. (AOL, IAC and to a lesser degree FIM or a well-executed roll-up of independent properties may present Yahoo! with the best competition on this front.)

The second blog entry is a much more innocuous TechCrunch piece on Angling Masters, a passion-centric community for fishers. The fact there is a profile-oriented fishing site does not surprise me. (I have stated many times before that for every popular forum site in the late 90s there will be popular profile-sites.) What surprised me was that more then 50% of the comments thought positively about the site’s potential and not one responder felt compelled to trash it. Just 6 months ago, a review of such a company would have drawn out dozens of fierce rants about the stupidity of bubble2.0, reckless VCs and copy-cat entrepreneurs. I’m not saying such rants don’t have a time and place for certain events, but the pundit chatter that passion-centric communities are fools gold that will flop faster then pets.com has almost come to a complete stop.

A final note that I’ll have to share here is a report today that ClubPenguin, a superb site for kids, has only 500,000 members but will make $67M this year AND they are very contentious about keeping site play and advertisements apart.

Hat-tip to Scott Rafer for pointing out a couple of these entries to me.