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I’m quoted in this Wired article about the history of “doggo”. Excerpt: 

Actually, there’s a strong case to be made that the word originated in Australia. To start, doggo first gained traction on a Facebook group called Dogspotting, a 10-year-old community that became quite popular in Australia, says internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch.

“Australian English has this tendency to make cute pet-names, what’s known in the literature as hypocoristics,” says McCulloch. “Like ‘afternoon’ becomes ‘arvo,’ or ‘avocado’ becomes ‘avo,’ or John becomes ‘John-o’.”

Ben Bergen, a cognitive science professor at UC San Diego, also notes “the -o suffix is much more common in Australia and Great Britain. Like ‘boy-o’ or nicknames for people, like ‘Jim-o.’”

“It’s possible the [Australians on Dogspotting] were just using this slang and it caught on as an internet thing because people encountered it in the group,” says McCulloch.

McCulloch’s research on doggo led her further down under, to a 1966 document titled “Industrial and intellectual property in Australia, Volume 3” in which the word was referenced as an affectionate term for a dog. (Doggo as a term for dog also made an appearance in a 1994 novel set in Sydney called the Weston Men’s Tennis Club.)