Dogster, a social network for, yes, dogs - and its sister site Catster - last week closed a $1 million round of financing. Naturally, some are dubious. But Michael Arrington, publisher of top tech blog TechCrunch, is not one of them. In fact, Arrington is an investor in the business, and it was his post yesterday in defense of the company that set off Web 2.0 skeptics. Blog Newsome.org quips: "I had a flying squirrel as a pet when I was a kid. I'm looking forward to Flyingsquirrelster." And Dead 2.0, which appears to be the spiritual descendent of FuckedCompany (and wonderfully lists itself as being in "Feta" as opposed to "Beta"), rounds up the coverage noting simply "Honestly, with all this craziness, it’s entirely possible they’ll get acquired long before they have the chance to fail."

As it happens, Dogster has an impressive Silicon Valley pedigree: it was founded by Web developer Ted Rheingold and counts a who's who of Web entrepreneurs on its board. Reporting last week, VentureBeat's Matt Marshall noted that Dogster and Catster had togther generated $100,000 in revenues in April, (not clear exactly why that's the most recent data.) The secret according to Marshall? "It is all about the dogs, but then it isn’t really," he writes. "Sure, dog owners are flocking to the site so that they can post pictures of their dogs, and check out the profiles of other dogs of the same breed, or of other owners in their neighborhood. But more interestingly, owners are pretending they are the dogs, and writing little diaries, and the diaries are often becoming more about themselves, as seen through their dogs eyes."

Well, The Browser is smart enough to know that pet owners are irrational and passionate lot. Already, over 200,000 of them seem to have created pages for their dogs on Dogster. And, unlike the infamous pet-related meltdowns of Web 1.0, there are no heavy bags of dog food here that require shipping at great expense over state lines. So, skeptics aside, just maybe this dog will hunt.