Embrace Pet Insurance Blog

Finding all the cool pet blogs over at Alltop

In between business and family, I try to keep up with what the cool kids are up to in cyberspace (or the interweb as some of my favorite mommy blogs tell it - that always cracks me up!).

Goodness knows, there's about 5 mins between mouthfuls of lunch where I can fit my roaming in, but about a month ago, I discovered one of the newest and useful websites Alltop. Alltop is a service I'd wished I'd had 5 years ago when I was asking everyone where all the good pet blogs were but no-one knew. Darn it, I just had to find them all by myself. Bah humbug!

Alltop, launched by Guy Kawasaki, is a site that categorizes and lists some of the more interesting blogs in a particular category. So if you wanted to find your own favorite mommy blogs but don't know where to start, you can go to the mom alltop category (and even if you do know where to start, there's bound to be one or two you weren't aware of.)

Or you had a hankering to follow all things to do with Gadgets, search no more - the gadget category is here...

You get the idea...

So, when I went to check out that pet category, I was aghast - there wasn't one! So with a quick email to some of my most respected pet bloggers, I pulled together a list of candidates and winged them off to Guy who kindly humored me and put them all up - woohoo!

So now you have it - the pet alltop category. Enjoy the list; there are some really good pet blogs in there.

Many thanks to Gina, Yvonne, Theresa, and Patty for helping out. I think we put together a pretty good list to kick things off.

What other pet blogs do you think should be added?

Geeking out - who owns certain pet insurance website domains?

I was playing around with Whois - a fun service for geeks who want to know who has registered a particular domain name. I figured I would take a look at who owns some hypothetical pet insurance domains - and what fun it turned out to be.

Let's start with www.purinapetinsurance.com - an obvious (but wrong) candidate for Purina to launch with. Who owns it? Strangely enough Veterinary Pet Insurance (VPI - largest pet insurer in the US) [if you are wondering, the Purina product is going out under www.PurinaCare.com.] Perhaps they have this because they used to have a relationship with Purina many years ago.

Moving right along, how about Walmart Pet Insurance - we all know Wal*mart has been getting its fingers into the financial services arena. No reason they wouldn't consider pet insurance for their stable of products. Turns out that has been snapped up by the Hartville Group (third largest pet insurer in the US.)

Along the same lines, what about Target Pet Insurance? Pet Protect has it (a smaller pet insurer that stopped selling new business in 2006.)

Very interesting! I wonder what the motivation for holding these urls is.

My question to my geekier friends out there - can you get big money out of holding branded domain names like this?

By the way, for those of you looking for some pet insurance web real estate to invest in, www.AmazonPetInsurance.com, www.BlueCrossPetInsurance.com, and www.CostcoPetInsurance.com are all free - for now.

Dig in!

Happy Mother's Day from all of us at Embrace

For those of you with four legged furry children who can't always express their love for their moms, who might sometimes be more than a handful but who always hangs on your every word - Happy Mother's Day.

And the same to our own mothers, wherever they may be.