Things That End in ‘Ster

While at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco, I met Ted Rheingold (here’s an interview with him). He’s the smary-pants behind the ultra-successful Dogster and Catster. Being petless, I’d never heard of these services before, but apparently Dogster has over 100,000 dogs on it. People interact on these networks as their pets, achieving a kind of anonymity. As has been my experience elsewhere, the more specific the social network, the more effective it becomes.

I haven’t delved very deeply into these sites, but clearly I’m missing some vocab. I went to the impressive advanced search page to try to find some photos of (picked more or less at random) huskies in BC. I couldn’t find the term ‘husky’ in the list of breeds. Instead, I eventually settled on ‘Canadian Eskimo Dog’, which sounds kind of politically incorrect. Regardless, I managed to find Schui, a 7-year-old husky from Halifax who must suffer the eternal shame of antlers strapped to his head.

Meanwhile, I recently read about Jobster on Heather from Microsoft’s popular recruiting blog:

Anyway, I am still exploring how I am going to be using Jobster moving forward. Starting to think about it as it related to our response to other company lay-offs, different kinds of campaigns, etc. Some other recruiters out there may want to share what they are doing. Guess I am kind of posting this so when someone asks me how I am using Jobster, I can point here.

I’ll try it out, if I ever want to work for the Man again.