Here is @pookers’ butt.

Someone flipped a box lid on top of themselves.

Sometimes we communicate this way in the morning. Isn’t Pookers cute?

He loves to sit next to me when I read.

I’m loving this book. Too bad it doesn’t help me with my cats!

This is my blog and I can post as many ‘hey my cat is cute and is sleeping’ videos that I want to, b’okay?

22 hours of sleep is obviously not enough.

Moments after this photo Pookers stole the Twizzler for himself.

Pookers is “working” with me today.

Date taken: November 3, 2007 | We love our Pookers.

One of the good examples of scaling communities mentioned was Flickr. Obviously they’ve become the community poster-child and rightly so. They’ve put a lot of thought and hard work into making their communities thrive, grow, and in some ways scale very nicely. However, there is still a limit that any community will hit and then it is forced to divide regardless of the feature-set that the service offers.

Online communities reflect their real-world counterparts so lets use New York City as an example of community division. Everyone that lives in New York City is part of a community. They all feel it. They all take pride in it. And in some way or another they all take part in it. However, none of them are familiar with everyone inside of their community. Most of them will never meet face to face. But each one of them has their own much smaller communities that they belong to. Maybe they work at a company, or visit the same coffee shop everyday, or play basketball with their same five friends in the park on Saturdays. Regardless, they’ve divided themselves from the much larger community and created or taken part in a much smaller community inside of the one that surrounds them.

Flickr has given some really great features to its group administrators allowing them to setup their own communities under the much larger Flickr community. That’s the first divide. Flickr has worked really hard to make those communities work well whether there are only two members of that group or ten thousand. But, is there a limit? I feel there is and it might be different for every community.

Once a group gets too large, other groups begin to emerge that may do things very much in the same way as the much larger group – yet they divide in order to find elbow room. To help themselves separate the signal from the noise or even just to pull their friends along. I’ve done this myself. I belong to both the 365days group and the MeToday group. However I’m far more active as a MeToday group member than I am a 365day group member because the MeToday group seems like its my friends getting together and posting their 365day shots. I’m a member of the enormous Macintosh group but I also belong to the Macbook and Apple symbol groups.

On Viddler I’ve noticed other divisions occurring too. We’ve not released any group type features, though we plan to, and yet already groups of people are banding together to create their own social groups. This is done a combination of ways and obviously marking each other as friends is one way, or tagging videos the same way is another. But then we have our forums where small grass roots efforts to form communities (like our newly formed Viral Marketing Team, which is too freaking cool) are taking place. This is the first divide. I’m sure we’ll begin to see others in the near future and I can’t wait for those days to come.

When you put people into the same place with similar interests they all band together with common goals. When that group reaches “the community limit”, they begin to divide while still being loyal to the larger group. I do not think that any set of features can help to stop this and I don’t think too much time should be put into trying to stop it either.

Pickles just chillin’

Before I get questions about his nails, we use soft nails on both of our cats and I personally can not recommend them enough. The cats are not subjected to the pain of removing part of their bodies (which is obviously less traumatic to the cats at an early age) and your furniture is not subjected to the habits of cats.

Although I’ve mentioned my cat Pickles a few times in the past I’ve definitely not mentioned him enough to consider this a “blog”.

Pickles is “my cat” in that I picked him out and that my wife has “her cat” Pookers. I found him online through some classifieds, went to meet the owner (who happened to be the husband of an ex-VP of a company I had worked for previously), and chose Pickles out of a pile of kittens in a box.

Since then, we’ve been close friends. He’s my bud. There are more photos of Pickles on Flickr if you’re interested.

[tags]animals, cat, pickles, pookers, soft paws, photos[/tags]
[slug]picklestoday[/slug]

Here is a list of the videos I’ve found so far… but there will be others on Viddler tagged with 5things.

• Esther Lee
• Josue Salazar
• King Zach Inglis
• Lisa Hightower
• Allen Stern
• Chris Fehnel
• James Mathias
• Alex Hillman
• Matthew Oliphant
• Erin
• … and our cat Pookers

I have no doubt that there will be more, so I am not going to “tag” anyone to do one…. but just say that anyone that feels like doing one, and has the ability, please do so. Some of them have been very enlightening so far.

We had been wanting to get new couches for quite awhile, and have been unable since we feared the cats instantly clawing them to shreds ^#. Our couches, as they were, were torn up quite a bit – and we didn’t want to spend money to just have the same result. So, we were left with the following options.

• Get rid of the cats
• Keep the cats quarantined in a single room
• Get them de-clawed
• Try out soft nails

We had considered all of these options for several weeks actually, and finally settled on giving the soft nails a try – and I think we’re both very happy that we did.

For the last week and half (since we got our new couches delivered), our cats have been in the office only, away from the couches. We let them out occasionally while we could supervise them, but we sat there watching their every move paranoid that they’d scratch up the couches again. Within minutes of having them out Pickles went crazy on them. So, we tossed them back into their “dungeon” and there they stayed until the soft nails were delivered and put on.

Yesterday, we got them in the mail. Our next challenge was putting them on. If you knew our cats, you’d know that Pickles would be a very little challenge while Pookers (my wife’s cat coincidentally) would be the ultimate test of this product. Actually, to be fair, it went much better than expected. We got a system down of how to handle the task, and within a few minutes both cats were walking around with their soft nails on.

Pookers with Packers colored nails

Eliza chose to outfit her cat with the colors of her favorite football team, The Green Bay Packers. You can’t see the yellow really, but we know it is there, and that is all that counts.

Pickles with blood red colored nails

Pickles, my little boy and the professional hunter that he is, looks like he just took down a wildebeest. I figured this would be more fitting than buying a color that would simply blend in and disappear.

Also, picking brighter colors will make it much easier for us to see if the cats have chewed off or grown out of any of their nails. Since we are going to have to put them back on about once per month.

Now, we can play with our cats without fear of laceration. They can play all over the couches without tearing them into little pieces. And, they look so cool while doing all of it.

[tags]cats, animals, pickles, pookers, soft nails, green bay packers[/tags]