The LOLCAT curators of ICanHasCheezburger are at it again. This time with pups at IHasAHotDog.

It just launched. Get in on it early.

See moar funny dog pictures.

Enjoy!

This year we prepared the definitive pet holiday gift guide of the “it” pet items for 2007. Only when you work as closely as we do to the pet world can you source, test and guarantee products like we do. If you have pet lovers in your life, just check out our Holiday Gift Guide for Dogs and Holiday Gift Guide for Cats to figure out what you’re getting them.

Even better, if you are a publication the entire guide is free to reprint with credit given to Dogster.com and Catster.com. Artwork is available. To use the guides in part or in their entirety, simply email our editor or call the office at 415.934.0400 to get full usage rights.

Here are some screenshots of a couple of pages from this year’s selections.

Happy Howlidays and a Furry New Year! ;>

In a 35-day period over 30,000 photos were entered in our 3rd Annual World’s Coolest Dog & Cat Show Photo Contest. The entries were literally scoured as 3,032,000 votes were cast. Finally, last week we determined the five highest vote averages in each of the 30 categories and posted the amazing dog finalists and cat finalists.

Here you can see a slideshow of the 150 amazing dog and cat photos. (Click through if you’re viewing in a feed reader and do not see the photos.)
 

The participation in our homegrown contest has been amazing. There was a 15% increase in entrants from last year and a 250% increase in voting and it shows: The quality of the finalists is better than ever!

Here is where you come in. Dog and cat “Best in Show” winners will be chosen based upon who gets the most votes. So click over to the contest and pick the Best in Show!

Google Sitelinks are the sublinks that appear under your domain in Google search results when they feel your site highly trafficked and a very precise match for the user’s query.

In our case this predominantly happens when someone searches on ‘Dogster’ or ‘Catster’. It may seem trivial, but since they are each respectively the most common search term leading to our sites, it’s rather important.

Dogster’s Sitelinks on November 9th, 2007

(As you can see, some of these Sitelinks are not helpful to any searcher)

Sitelinks give the searcher deep links into your site if they have an idea of what they are looking for. The Google bot picks what it thinks are the most important links, but it rarely gets it entirely right, so it’s important to check yours regularly and cull it. Note how Dogster and Catster (see below) don’t even have the same Sitelinks even though the homepages have very similar templates. Often it’s just not possible for the Googlebot to know what is the most important or what page’s title make no sense to a new visitor.

Hiten had creatively advised us previously to add any files we don’t want appearing in the Sitelinks to our robots.txt. It took a couple weeks, but the links eventually got cycled out. However, that also meant that those links would never come up even if explicitly searc hed for.

Now thanks to a link in a comment in a Gooruze answer I was directed to by Clay from Minti, I see Google has finally created a tool to let you explicitly block a link from being a Sitelink without having to have it removed from the search results altogether.

To view and manage your Sitelinks, go to the Google Webmaster Tools and click your site(s). In the left menu click Links, then click Sitelinks. If you’re not using Google Webmaster Tools, and care about inbound Google traffic get on it. They provide some decent (but not extensive) views into how the Googlebot is crawling your site

Catster’s Sitelinks on November 9th, 2007

Now I’m off to block some of the Catster Sitelinks.

Related Entries:
Master Your Google Analytic Stats with Filters
Google Keeps Loosing Our ‘Dog’

Our World’s Coolest Dog and Cat photo contest is extremely addictive and has been registering almost 100,000 distinct votes a day. It just broke 2.1 million votes, and it’s not slowing at all.

Finalists are chosen based on the highest average scores, so there’s still plenty of time to enter and get the vote out.

Here are some entries I’ve came across recently:

Vladimir Punikki in “Playful”

Fausto in “Ball or Frisbee Player”

Pooh Bear in “Stretch & Yawn”

Teagan in “Craziest Tail”

OpenSocial is a crackling new public universal internet platform design that lets social networks (for lack of a better word) allow embeddable app providers (for lack of a better word) to avail the social underpinnings of the hosting social network simply for the benefit of the person who has chosen to embed the app in a profile page on that network.

I think OpenSocial will be very beneficial. Here are 10 reasons why.

1. Its de facto purpose is to be a universally functional data sharing structure, and its de real purpose is to be so good that Facebook and proprietary platforms do not inherit the web. These goals are very well-aligned and will be difficult to pervert.
2. OpenSocial is so well-backed (Google, MySpace, Bebo, Six Apart, Hi5, LinkedIn, etc.) it cannot be ignored. Yet, it’s so well backed a single party, not even Google, will be able to control its growth and purpose.
3. It will stave off the Balkanization of the web into platforms, which means we as an industry may only need to develop for 3-5 major platforms (including mobile) vs. dozens.
4. APIs may all use friendly XML markup, but not all APIs are the same. Hardly. Right now the situation with APIs could be compared to Romance languages. They use the same alphabet, but all the words are different. OpenSocial APIs will be akin to using the same alphabet and the same words.
5. The ‘platform’ of OpenSocial is closer to the middle of the internet, where business, open standards, and internet experimentation meet, not off within one compound that offers in-and-out privileges.
6. It will quickly ossify the universal data encapsulation of the social graph. (I always liked Mark Z’s term ’social graph.’) Friend lists, event feeds, public calendars, personal profile values, etc., etc. should, in reality, all be highly accessible yet with highly respected and standardized privacy settings so users have complete control of what they share with whom. OpenSocial will hasten the formalizing of these data structures much faster than 25 rival entities.
7. Since its charter is so firmly open, even if, for example, Google makes quick hooks that allow for Google CheckOut or AdSense usage (which it absolutely should) those hooks will be equally easy for PayPal, Amazon, Yahoo, Lookery (what up Scott ;), etc. to use as well. They will be open to all.
8. Everyone—App makers, social networks, everyday people—will be able to get the most out of everything the whole system can collectively offer. Facebook showed the potential of formalizing the social graph. OpenSocial, with Facebook, will get it to escape velocity.
9. It will challenge the excellent Facebook platform, and any other platform provider, to make its offering the best it can be, which will then force the OpenSocial platform to be as good as it can be. Real, emotional public challenge for superiority is good in technology.
10. The days of screen-scraping-as-an-API need to end. Storing people’s passwords for other services is digital upskirting and fosters bad user habits. Standards will make the data open faster.

Here are 3 reasons why OpenSocial will be problematic.

1. Security will be up to the container provider (i.e., the social network), which means if it is not vigilant, slippery tentacles of nefariousness may be able to wiggle past them in all types of new and unforeseen ways.
2. As open as it will likely be, Google will be able to take advantage of its central role. Google currently has so much information already on users and their actions, each new subset makes it all more valuable and all the harder to not exploit. So what seems like ether data to the small nodes most all of us are, becomes meaningful (and lucrative) when viewed at Google-scale.
3. The inexorable extensibility of its charter may make it a troublesome beast in five-plus years’ time as online sociality may grow in ways far deeper then we can currently grasp. Five years ago the term Social Network hardly existed, same with syndicated blog feed, friend news, proximity aware, etc. Things may be forced opened that should remain closed.

To get yourself up-to-speed quickly on this very new reality, read entries on OpenSocial by Marc Andreessen, Dave McClure and Anil Dash.

The OpenSocial homepage was supposed to go live Thursday.

[digg it] [delicious it]