Halloween PawPawty

Maybe you are not familiar with PawPawty. Mostly once a month animals on Twitter get together for a virtual party to raise money for various animal charities. It might be hard to imagine what a virtual pawty is.

First there is a theme. The one this weekend was, of course, Halloween. Last month it was a farm theme and the month before it was Woodstock. We all dress up our avatars in keeping with the theme. For this pawty, some of the anipals were really dressed up in their Halloween costumes. Not me though. I put my foot down when mom tried to get me in the costume. So I just decorated my avatar.

Really talented anipals get together and develop a nommy menu of food we would love to eat and drinks, including alcoholic pleasures, that fit the theme. I'm afraid many anipals over indulge on the alcohol and do crazy things or pass out. I worked my way through all 8 of the very special cocktails offered by the barktending staff. I did not make it much past midnight.

Really organized anipals schedule the barktenders, sekurity and DJs. This is not easy. Pawpawty is an international event and trying to do a schedule of folks all over the world is enough to make my head spin. Barktenders make the drinks and pass them to the anipals who ask for them. They do the food too. Sekurity reports spammers, resolves any issues where one anipal might put the bitey on another (that doesn't happen very often), and reminds folks that stop by, using the #pawpawty hash tag what we are all about. They also remind folks about the charity and where to go to pay the "cover charge."

I saved the very best for last because we have DJs too. This time there were so many DJ volunteers some anipals only got to DJ for 45 minutes. It was fun. I got to DJ from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT. The Halloween theme was fun to find music for. I tried to pick songs that had the flavor of the celebration but probably would not be played by ever DJ. We use blip to tweet the songs. @Fergusthedog did a great job scheduling the DJs.

All anipals may not use TweetGrid for their #pawpawty tweets but I like to use it. You can set up three columns. One to get all of the #pawpawty tweets, one for your @ replies and one for the DJ (it is easy to miss the song playing if you don't do that).

If you want to be in on the next #pawpawty, follow @frugaldougal. He is the host with the most. Lots of work go into these pawpawties behind the scenes. @Georgetheduck did a masterful job putting together all of the anipal avatars into a wall of photos for the event so we can always remember how much fun we had!


http://www.twitpic.com/n2f1b