An absolute stocking stuffer on this appisode of the show. Doug Chernack, co-author of the 'Awkward Family Photo' series talks to me via skype about the latest New York Times best seller: "Awakward Family Pet Photos"

There's a lot more to this than just the photos though, there's the stories behind the pictures and of course Doug and his co-author's future plans for video.

Purchase a copy of Doug & Mike's book in multiple formats on Amazon

This video has been rotated and formatted to fit a non smart-phone screen, it is best viewed in the free Big App Show app.

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Access this page directly at awkwardfamilypetphotos.bigbookshow.com

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 12/13/2011; 1:05:19 PM.   .

I've been using twitter rss feeds to follow people and entities I'm interested in for almost a year now.

The benefit I get from this is twofold; the tweets I want to see show up in my river of news aggregator and I don't have to 'follow' someone or for that matter, let them know I follow them, when I am in fact, following them.

A few hours ago I started noticing that links posted in tweets are are being transformed in the user's rss feed. Instead of the url linking to the intended web resources of the tweeted link, it takes you to the original tweet. From here you can click on the link and get to what you were looking for in the first place.

This practice is clearly intended for twitter to recieve a return on their rss investment, by adding an extra click to your navigation through them. Presumably for advertising, tracking and other purposes beneficial to twitter.

It is admittedly a bit annoying, but so is Richard Stallmans feed, which essentially does the same thing, taking you to his website first before you can access the intended link.

I am encouraged by this move from twitter. It shows they see value in continuing to provide rss feeds of their user's content, and at a minimum it means they are hedging their bets.

At best I think this is not the genius of twitter's (the company) management, but of a smart engineer who is one of us, on the inside, showing the value of the feeds. For this, I salute the unknown sysadmin!

[post script] I am seeing some links in rss tweets that are not yet showing the behaviour described above. I'm hoping this is just how twitter features roll out, like thier new interface, it might take several days. On the other hand I could be entirely wrong, in which case I hope this post will give someone @twitter a good idea....

 12/13/2011; 7:42:26 AM.   .