aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, December 07, 2007

See Spot Blog*

Started as simple photo-sharing site in 2004, Dogster is now a popular online meeting place for pet owners. From the Fashion & Style section of yesterday’s NYTimes:

Think of Dogster as Facebook for canines. There, my dogs (along with 346,639 other four-legged members, as of last week) had their own profile pages that listed their likes and dislikes, personal mottoes — Otto’s is “Are you going to finish that?” — and best tricks (“catching seedless grapes in mid-air").

So what if my dogs could barely type, much less upload photos of themselves wearing Santa hats?

We live in an era where there is a social network to cater to any niche group you can think of, including infants whose parents create Facebook profiles for them and then expect the godparents to pretend to correspond with the babies. Why shouldn’t pets arrange play dates online or blog about their health issues?

* I’m wondering how many of you will understand what the wordplay in the title of this post is about. For those who don’t… when I was a small child the standard grade school reading texts were the (now classic) Dick and Jane books.

The main characters in these books were the children Dick and Jane. Prominently featured was their dog Spot in paragraphs I remember like so:

See Spot.
See Spot walk.
See spot run…

Such paragraphs have been parodied by the Simpsons and can now found on t-shirts like this:

C:/DOS C:/DOS/RUN RUN/DOS/RUN

Apparently the books were effective. And still are.