Week #395-396 Special Edition

The observant reader will note that we missed our appointment with the weeknotes last week. I travelled to Spain in the middle of the week and the amount of work and meetings made very difficult to publish the weeknote. Anyway, we’ve compiled last two weeks in this special, small, cute edition.

First day in Madrid was spent in a meeting with Bazaar’s founders. We’re close to the internal/beta launch of the component that will be the backbone of their e-commerce system and there is a lot of small details to close, tweak and fix.

Next day we travelled to Basque Country to have a 2 day intensive workshop with Verkami founders. We met in a beautiful country house in the middle of the Goierri. We talked about new features, operations improvement and how to make Verkami even better for authors and patrons.

This kind of highly focused countryside retreats always work wonders on us. No matter if it’s a hackaton, a few days workshop or a product design session, we’ve found that committing yourself to just one thing in unusual, beautiful physical surrondings is always a refreshing and very productive experience. Of course, the fact the Basque Country is packed with amazing restaurants and Michelin Stars is a plus.

This last week was the normal continuation of the previous one. I worked in Stage and Verkami’s new features while Alberto made progress in Bazaar’s last steps. Additionally I was forced to present the ritual offerings to the bureacracy gods in the form of a few mornings spent filling up forms and renovating different IDs.

But enough of talking about us. You want the links, right? Here we go, double edition, double recommendation. This time links that are loosely related to another of my favorite topics: digital rights and digital property.

• Philip Roth was shocked -for very good reasons- after discovering that according to some wikipedia administrators he “was not a credible source” on his own book The Human Stain. Here is the open letter he wrote to reply the editing Ayatollahs. Next time you hear the Wikipedia is one the biggest achievements of humans in the last decades, please remember we’re still learning how to deal with the toy.
• A few days ago Amazon sent us the healthy reminder that “you don’t buy ebooks, you rent them” and that they can do basically whatever they want with your(their) books: (unless the case become popular and they feel forced to fix it).

So that’s it. Have a great weekend!