A few months ago, an industry mentor (Marc Andreessen) launched a company named Ning. Its mission: to be anything. Rather, to be a platform upon which you could do stuff that you normally can’t do on your own. I didn’t pay much attention to it until today, when I came up with an idea that I wanted to build - but didn’t want to babysit the software, pay for development, etc. Ya know, one of those “hey, this would be cool” ideas that would normally get shoved to the backburner?

You know I love my two dogs, Wicket and Pixie. They’re two little fluffballs of joy who have charmed their way into our hearts. Every so often, I’ll record videos of ‘em doing something silly. Those videos usually go no further than my hard drive (unless I upload ‘em to my blog). Well, I thought, why can’t I put ‘em on a separate site - and let other dog owners and lovers upload videos starring their own dog(s)? Yeah, great idea - but no infrastructure. So, in Ning, I created DogStars. In there, you can upload a video of your dog for other dog lovers to see. What’s more, you can specify the breed of your dog (to subsequently meet other breed owners and watch their dog videos). Of course, I have a “mutt” category in there - although I gave our two mixed-breeds their own category of Lhasashizapoo.

So, I’m inviting you - for free - to upload small videos of your dogs onto DogStars. I only have a basic account with Ning, so videos can only be 10MB in size (which you should be able to edit easily in Windows Movie Maker or something like that). I know not all of you have dogs, but I’m betting that several of you do. I’m dog-fooding Ning, if you will (kinda). Who knew there were so many breeds of dogs around?! I’m sure I left a few out, too. Well, if nothing else - try it and let me know what you think. Do people really care enough to upload and watch videos of dogs? Honestly?

[tags]video,ning,dog,puppy,dogs,dogstars,puppies,pooch,breed[/tags]