I’ve made a new version of my clojure-hadoop library. Downloads are on the main page.

List of changes here. This fixes some missing pieces in the first release, and adds some more Hadoop configuration options.

My Hadoop World NYC talk went off well; here are my slides [PDF]

Hello, everyone.

I’ll be performing my Clojure+Hadoop magic tricks at the following events:

Friday, October 2: Hadoop World NYC.  Use the code hadoopworld_friend for 10% off the registration fee.

Monday, October 5: NoSQL NYC Meetup.  Free!

At both events I’ll be talking about:

• Why Clojure and Hadoop are a perfect fit.
• How to write Hadoop jobs in Clojure.
• My clojure-hadoop library.
• Storage options for Clojure data structures.

Will post slides after, and recordings if they are available.

A first for me — I’ve been translated! Frontier Economy interviewed me about AltLaw, then translated my responses into Spanish.

The Interview in English

The Interview in Spanish

I wrote an article for Cornell’s VoxPopuLII blog: Tidying Up the Law.

It’s about the curious intersection of computer science, legal scholarship, and the Lexis-Westlaw corporate duolopy.

I have, to my chagrin, recently discovered Twitter. I was at a conference at which the attendees twittered (tweeted?) every presentation as it happened. One speaker accidentally/deliberately left his Twitter client running during his presentation, resulting in a stream of jokes and off-color comments in the corner of his PowerPoint slides.  Maybe every presentation should do this. That way you’d know if you were boring your audience.

Update: Slides and video available at LispNYC.

Ok, it’s really happening this time:

Stuart Sierra presents: Implementing AltLaw.org in Clojure

This talk demonstrates the power of combining Clojure with large Java frameworks, such as:

• Hadoop – distributed map/reduce processing
• Solr – text indexing/searching
• Restlet – REST-oriented web framework
• Jets3t – Amazon S3

Join us from 7:00 – 9:00 at Trinity Church in the heart of the East Village. Afterward the discussion will continue at the Sunburnt Cow on 9th and C.

We had to cancel my talk for tomorrow night, due to problems with the venue. LispNYC will still meet at the Sunburnt Cow, 137 Avenue C, for drinks and discussion. My presentation has been postponed to the June meeting.

Up at Cornell, Tom Bruce has a post about the problem of funding open access to legal materials. This brings to mind a conversation I had with a doctor friend recently about AltLaw. My friend, accustomed to the open-access requirements of NIH grants, was frankly shocked that there are no comparable rules for legal decisions.

Screenshot: PubMed home page

A related problem is how to make people aware of what free services are available. AltLaw has been around for two years, and while traffic has grown steadily, it has not gotten as much attention as commercial startups operating similar services. Admittedly, we have done no advertising at all, and that’s our fault. “If you build it they will come” we thought, naïvely. But how would we advertise? I’m a programmer; the people I work with are law professors. None of us know the first thing about marketing, and quite frankly, none of us care. Seen in that light, Cornell’s recent partnership with Justia.com is a smart move that will benefit everyone working on open-access law, since it will expose more lawyers to the idea.

What makes an on-line community?  In the past two weeks I have received announcements of three new “communities” all interested in using open-source software to retrieve, share, and analyze data from or about governments.  Most of these announcements say the same thing: “A lot people seem to be working on this, but they aren’t talking to each other.”  Each group has a slightly different slant, but in my mind I lump them all under the heading “Semantic Government,” i.e. building the semantic web for government data.

I started casting out a few search queries, and quickly compiled a list of eight different mailing lists and/or wikis devoted to this subject.  That doesn’t include for-profits like Justia.com or larger non-profits like the Sunlight Foundation.

This is a problem.  Not only do I have to subscribe to half a dozen mailing lists to keep abreast of what others are doing, I also have to cross-post to several lists when I want to announce something myself.  So far, nothing I have posted to these lists has garnered as much response as private emails sent directly to people whom I know are subscribed to the lists.

Perhaps the very idea of a “web-based community” has become a victim of its own success.  Back in the olden days, when I was still learning how to type, creating an on-line community was hard.  You had to wrangle with BBS software, mailing list managers, or content management systems.  It took dedicated individuals willing to invest considerable time and money.  Now?  Just go to Google / Yahoo / Facebook / whatever flavor-of-the-month service, type in the name of your group and presto, you’re a “community.”

The problem is that it’s now easier to start a group than to join one.  Every project wants to be the center of its own community, but what most projects actually get is a lonely soapbox in the wilderness from which to cry, “Announcing version 0.x…”

I’m equally guilty in this trend, having founded one of the sites I referred to above (LawCommons) and built a wiki for another (IGOTF).  Once you’ve started a site it’s easier to leave it there than to formally announce “I am shutting down X and throwing my lot in with Y.”  It’s also a hedge against the (very likely) possibility that group Y won’t be around in a year.  But I worry that a broad movement (Semantic Government) fragmented into so many tiny sub-groups will never gather enough momentum to succeed.  The very thing we all want — to share information better — is lost through the scattered efforts to achieve it.