Bark it to the rooftops, Dogster.com is the 2005 official Webby selection for Best Community Website. I was honestly overjoyed it was nominated and winning is simply something I never thought that would happen.

What I find particularly fascinating about winning this community award (our second this year after winning the SXSW People’s Choice) is that Dogster was not created to be an active community website. Dogster was started, and is still at heart, what I call a post and share website. A place for someone to make a web-page for their favorite dog and a place where anyone else can come and enjoy all the great postings. Members could save their favorite dogs to their corral and could also become Pup Pals with friends and have their pages crossed listed, which allowed for easier exploration of everyone else.

The site’s community, therefore, was simply a more focused version of the community we find on the internet as a whole. And our exact phenomena is described by Howard Rheingold in his still visionary book Smart Mobs when he quotes Cory Doctrow as describing a community of “sheep that shit grass.” This describes an ecosystem where the organisms’ waste is actually fodder for everyone else. That is exactly the kind of community Dogster started out. For every self-motivated person that wants to show off their beloved pup and cross-list pages, every other dog lover has more pup pages to explore and ways to explore them.

Since launching Dogster in January of 2004 many traditional and web 2.0 community features have been added such as private messaging, forums, diaries, voting, and leaving treats, but a key to the success is that each additional feature is custom designed and written so it will maximize sharing of peoples’ puppy passion while minimizing the chance for inappropriate, unsafe or mean community behavior to spring up. Everything goes back to the core principle of encouraging sharing the passion they have in common, and discouraging risking personal information and connections about anything else. As much as Dogster wants to be your internet source for puppy and pet fun, we don’t want to be your source for much anything else.

I’m really shocked at how Dogster could be considered the single best community on the Internet, but if you ask me why i think it won I’d have to say it’s this deep commitment to reflecting user passion with a focus that is more on sharing just what they have in common and not encouraging exploring off into what they don’t.