Dogster. Catster. Wowster.

Dog­ster and Cat­ster. Heard of them? Well it seems just about every­body at SXSW has by now. I wasn’t at the ses­sion, but I struck up a con­ver­sa­tion with Michael and Lau­ra Mon­cur of Star­ling Stu­dios and they broke it down for me in the way that a Hol­ly­wood Block­buster can be pitched:

“It’s basi­cal­ly Am I Hot or Not for pets.”

Killer “why didn’t I think of that so I can be wealthy and still work for Green­peace” con­cept. You upload your pet’s pho­tos. They make friends like on MySpace. Like a dog? Give it a bone. And of course the more bones you have, the cool­er you are.

You can search on pets by breed, loca­tion, favorite activ­i­ties, an insane amount of infor­ma­tion.
Accord­ing to Mike and Lau­ra, site-cre­ator Ted Rhine­gold is pulling a mil­lion bucks a year off of ads, mer­ch and the seem­ing­ly end­less means of mon­e­tiz­ing this site he has fig­ured out. Well deserved. He’s obvi­ous­ly mak­ing a lot of peo­ple crazy hap­py. The­se sites are just pure unadul­ter­at­ed sil­ly joy.
Lau­ra comes up with a Green­peace fundrais­ing con­cept: What if you could make a pet a Green­peace mem­ber? There are gifts on the site now that you can actu­al­ly buy for Dogs you REALLY like: rib­bons and such. What if you could make your pet part of the solu­tion to cli­mate change by becom­ing a card-car­ry­ing mem­ber? What if your cat could help stomp out envi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tants? Quirky, crazy, nut­ty, cool.
Or may­be it’s time for… WHALESTER!
Got­ta go. More insane cre­ativ­i­ty fields to run through to see what sticks! 

tech­no­rati tags:sxsw, sxswi, sxswi07, sxswi2007, dog­ster, cat­ster

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