Pugtastic. Tori Spelling and her dog Mimi La Rue now have their own profile page and diary on Dogster. Mimi is even a co-star in Tori & Dean’s T.V. show Inn Love.

Mimi La Rue’s page is all tricked out and she’s keeping a diary entitled Confessions of a Canine Drama Queen. It’s got gossip about Tori and Dean, their son Liam and of course, the show, Inn Love. Did you know the B&B Tori & Dean run is named after Mimi? Mimi is also a member of the Dogster Groups ♥All Fur Fun♥, For The Love Of Pug!, Pugapalooza, and Pug Pals

Here are some pix:

And for the love of dog, check out Oxygen’s homepage for Tori & Dean show Inn Love, not to mention Tori’s own homepage

For those of you keeping track, Tori’s Mimi La Rue joins Hillary Duff’s pup Lola Duff as our Hollywoof celebs. I wonder if they’re Pup Pals?

I am very pleased to introduce Pup-Peroni Dog Snacks as our newest Dogster site sponsor.

Site sponsors are much more than branded presence on each page, they are companies that have made a deep commitment to making the site experience, information and resources better than we could on our own. In this manner site visitors are able to interact with them as a community members not just a static billboard. In business terms this means far superior ROI and long-lasting deep emotional connections betweens customers and company.

Conversely Dogster has now become a member of their nationwide Pup Patrol tour. Steven caught up with them in Chicago! ha!

Pup-Patrol Tour Schedule:

• August 28 through September 25 – Pittsburgh
• October 2 and 9 – Detroit and Philadelphia
• October 16 – Columbus and New York City
• October 23 – Cleveland and New York City
• October 30 and November 6 – Chicago and Boston
• March 5 and 12 – Houston and Tucson
• March 19 and 26 – Dallas and Phoenix
• April 2 and 9 – Austin and San Diego
• April 16 and 23 – San Antonio and Los Angeles/Orange County
• April 30 – Atlanta and Los Angeles
• May 7 – Atlanta and San Francisco
• May 14 – Orlando and San Francisco
• May 21 – Orlando and Sacramento
• May 28 and June 4 – Miami and Portland
• June 11 and 18 – Charlotte and Seattle
• June 25 and July 2 – Washington DC and Charlotte
• July 9 – Baltimore and Denver
• July 16 – New York City and Denver
• July 23 and 30 – Rhode Island and Minneapolis
• August 6 – Connecticut and St. Louis
• August 13 – Boston and St. Louis

Pup-Peroni Dog Snacks joins our other great sponors, Shutterfly, 9Lives Cat Food and Arm & Hammer Odor Alert

Recently we migrated 18 MySQL MyISAM tables to InnoDB. (We would have changed another 20 smaller ones if we weren’t hamstrung by a OS issue we’ll be resolving soon.)

The change has significantly reduced the overall load as well as short-term spikes on our master database. Below you see a chart of our primary master’s 15, 5 and 1 minute average loads over the last 3 weeks. As you can see this critical machine is now much calmer and ready to handle significantly more capacity.

Recent Load on our MySQL Master Server

It turns out that the benefits of row-level locking, in many cases, is not just for high volume UPDATE tables anymore and the reads off the slaves are no slower than MyISAM. This, apparently, was consistently agreed to at this year MySQL Conference in April. Big props to Greg and Laine for realizing this and making it happen.

Joy Ward, our dog blogger extraordinaire, just ran a great interview with Cesar Milan, better known for his hit T.V Show, The Dog Whisperer. His no nonsense, love-filled approach has made him a worldwide sensation.

Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Cesar’s dog Daddy is a big hit on the site, and you may be able to hear him bark in person (or should IO say dogson) during his 10 city nationwide tour.

Far and away the biggest unprepared for challenge of growing Dogster to a million dollar business has been building a great team of coworkers and keeping them challenged, happy and motivated.

John Vars, co-founder and Chief Product Officer has proposed a panel to SXSW Interactive on this topic which we think is a far too overlooked in today’s entrepreneurial fervor.

If you agree or want to learn more, please take the time to vote 5 stars for his panel - Start-Up Management 2.0 — Keeping Teams Motivated, Productive, Happy.

We knew when we started this that we wanted it to be a respectful, better company then others we had worked in before. Once we got to about 10 employees we realized that simply doing what we thought was the right way and the actually right way as desired by our team were actually quite different.

In reality your employees are even more important than your customers. If you think of all the things you do to go the extra mile for your customers is the same approach you should take for your employees. Of course you could go the “churn and burn” or “intern and oversees” route, but the way we see it, life’s too short to not aspire for something better than the bottom of the barrel.

You can vote for it now.

Also, I’d highly recommend exploring the whole panel picker. SXSW has gone further then any event I know to get panels on stage that are really the ones that people want to see.

You’ve probably heard me say more then once that our members are the most amazing online community on the net. The Boston Globe published an article on one of the reasons that makes me so confident of my assessment.

A year ago we created the Catster Railroad and Dogster Railroad forum topics as a response to the fact that that members were spontaneously coming together to transport pets in desperate need hundreds if not tens of hundreds of miles to a family wishing to take them in. Members will drive 6,8,10 hours and hand off the pets-in-need to the next drive that will do a similar leg and so on until the animal reaches it furever home. Completely strangers coming together to save an animal they’ve never met. It’s amazing.

The Boston Globe article covers the the inspirational details of what the community came to call “Operation Miracle Manx.”

Facing a death sentence in West Virginia, Jillian and Jasper [the Manx cats] traveled 1,245 miles by car, truck, and van over 21 hours, finally crossing the border and arriving safely in New Brunswick, Canada.
…
For their getaway, the cats received help from 14 pet lovers from seven states, each of whom drove the cats one leg of the trip and passed them on to the next driver. The pet enthusiasts coordinated the journey through the website Catster Railroad. Like the website Dogster Railroad, the Catster Railroad facilitates the transportation of homeless animals from over-stuffed shelters to open-armed adopters, no matter how far-flung

This is what happens when you can unite hundreds of thousands of people with like-minded passions. Ersatz strangers can band together within hours to do something that could have never been achieved individually or without the internet. And this particular phenomena happens on almost a weekly basis. Thanks to writer Robbie Brown for doing the research, sniffing out this story and bringing it well deserved light.

Here’s a screen grab of the cover photo and title

UPDATE: The Position was filled 8/27/07. Thanks to everyone that applied.

It is with great pleasure that I type, Dogster, Inc. is seeking an Interactive Designer to join our team full-time. The selected designer will have an excellent opportunity to make wonderful product that will be loved by millions.

Here is the job description.

Dogster.com and Catster.com – two of the most vibrant, passion-centric, pet-centered communities on the web – are seeking an exceptional designer to join our team. This is a full-time position providing a fantastic opportunity to work as part of a highly creative, thriving social networking platform.

The ideal candidate will know what it means to work at a fast-paced, rapidly-growing profitable start-up, and be inspired to help push the envelope in creating the best user experience for our vibrant, passion-centric sites.

Day to day responsibilities will involve:

• » User interface design - producing wire frames, visual design mock-ups, and web-ready images for web projects. Communicating/presenting UI ideas and design rationale to team members
• » Designing custom buttons, icons, banner ads as needed
• » Developing creative solutions for in-house marketing and editorial campaigns under the direction of the Director of Product Marketing and Managing Editor
• » Developing UI and visual design specifications and style guides, and ensuring design consistency across sites
• » Working directly with engineers on site features, enhancements and updates.
• » Testing and QA of new site features

Requirements:

• » Several years professional experience in graphic design, web design, interface design.
• » Proven experience in the research, design, and prototyping of new user experiences
• » Ability to balance designs with clear knowledge of technical constraints
• » Highly proficient in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and ImageReady
• » Working knowledge of Flash
• » Extremely detail oriented
• » Strong visual problem solving skills with understanding of typography, layout and visual applications and treatments.
• » Solid understanding of Web 2.0 trends
• » CSS proficiency
• » Self-motivated, ability to work independently to implement creative and editorial direction
• » Ability to thrive in a fast-paced iterative development environment, which includes initiating projects, delivering on time, communicating well, and following-through.

Also Desired:

• » HTML proficiency and solid understanding of database driven content sites
• » Thorough, passionate and active familiarity with social networking sites, and the latest and greatest web sites and design projects
• » Excellent knowledge of InDesign. Some pre-press and print experience.
• » Pet lover!

This position will report to the Direct of Product Marketing. We are looking for the right person, so salary and exact title will be dependent on experience.

Please email portfolio samples or URL, resume, and letter of introduction to ellen@dogster.com.

We’re also seeking a new Community Manager.

Paul Thomasch of Reuters did a lengthy interview with me which he turned into a piece on Dogster, Catster passion-centric online communities. He sums it up pretty quickly with this quote:

“These are about adults sharing about what they are passionate about in a safe, fun, informative environment,” said Ted Rheingold, 37, who founded Dogster and its sister site, Catster.

The article has been reprinted in the New York Times, USA Today, and was a featured link on the yahoo.com homepage today. We’ve already had over 1,000 pet profiles created today (about 2x the norm) and as many new members join. We also had a double day in terms on new subscribers and Zealie purchases. (The Zealie being the currency for gift giving in Dogster and Catster land ;)

Here’s a screen grab of the Yahoo homepage

Last week Eric and Tofu of the amazing meme aggregator and generator site I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER visited Dogster & Catster HQ.

Eric gave us the background on how we saw the photo meme getting started and how they turned a wordpress, a massive gmail account and some creative photo hosting into a 3-4 terabyte-a-month service that become more popular then cuteoverload and has pageviews / visit that are more like a community site then a blog.

He showed us all the custom features he’s built in to upload, ranks (karma) link, share, and make ChzCat photos. Trust me, this is no photodump site, it’s a thriving community that is said to be the most popular site on all of wordpress.com.

If you talk with Eric for five minutes you’ll realize this is no dumb luck schtick. If you listen to him talk for an hour you’ll realize there isn’t any luck at all.

ICanHasCheezburger’s commitment to their community, to their visitors and even to any viewing one of their hosted photos who may never even realize where the photo came from is paramount to everything they do. They are as hands on as it gets and they are doing all they can to live up to their visitors desires every day.

We have the same commitment at Dogster & Catster so getting together has actually felt like reconnecting with a twin we never knew.

I took photos. (Click thru if you don’t see a slide show.)

Must-read cover article in BusinessWeek on the state of pets in America. There is also an excellent video Reporters Journal by the author Diane Brady as well as a video news segment on the state of the pet economy.

Here are some nuggets for you busy people

• » Americans will spend $41B on pets this year, more than double what it was a decade ago.
• » In 2007 Americans will spend $10.8B on movies, $11.6B playing video games and $10.6B on recorded music.
• » It is estimated Americans will spend $52B on pets in 2009!
• » About 63% of U.S. households, or 71 million homes, now own at least one pet, up from 64 million just five years ago.
• » There are 88M cats and 75M dogs in the United States.
• » Half of all dog owners say they consider their pet’s comfort when buying a car.
• » Pet owners are now less driven by price than “emotion and passion.” Philip L. Francis, CEO of PetSmart Inc.
• » Pets are now full-fledged members of the family, Ted Rheingold, Top Dog, Dogster, Inc. (They didn’t quote me, I’m just saying this because it’s true ;)

Read the whole article and watch the video Reporters Journal and video news segment.