Fred Stutzman
About: I am a graduate student and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina's School of Information Science. Additionally, I am the co-founder of ClaimID.com, the consumer identity management project. My research explores digital identity, online social networks, and the use of social technologies in relational development and maintenance. I am also interested in political uses of social technologies; to that extent, I consult with political candidates and write about the topic at techPresident.com.
Photos:
Blog Posts
Digital Media and Learning Competition 2008
--Great news from the HASTAC team - the 2008 DML Competition has launched! Following the success of the 2007 competition, the team is awarding anoth...
New course: Technologies of Friendship
--I’ve completed a draft version of the syllabus to my new course, Technologies of Friendship. The course is on the books as a CMC course, but...
Freedom in the Telegraph
--Following yesterday’s excitement regarding Freedom’s appearance in BoingBoing and Lifehacker, the Telegraph (UK) has an article about t...
And we’re live
--…I hope. This is the first “real” post of the new Unit Structures. The last post on the now-defunct Unit Structures has some st...
Open Thread - New Blog, New Design
--Welcome to the new Unit Structures. I’m glad to be off Blogger, and I’m doubly glad to be using Wordpress. If you have any suggestion...
Leaving Blogger - Please update your links
--I've been meaning to leave Blogger for a while, but for whatever reason - Google juice, convenience, archives - I've stuck around. However, the ot...
Twitter, free-riders, and lived community
--Yesterday, Twitter introduced some changes to their privacy model. Previously, if you employed privacy (kept your Twitters private), allowing some...
Twitter, free-riders, and lived community
--Yesterday, Twitter introduced some changes to their privacy model. Previously, if you employed privacy (kept your Twitters private), allowing some...
BarCampRDU is this Saturday!
--Dave Johnson, Wayne Sutton and a cast of supporters have been doing heroic work preparing for 2008's BarCampRDU. The conference will go down this ...
BarCampRDU is this Saturday!
--Dave Johnson, Wayne Sutton and a cast of supporters have been doing heroic work preparing for 2008’s BarCampRDU. The conference will go down...
Thinking about socio-technical
--In a few days I'll be heading off to the Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems in Ann Arbor, MI. This is the inaugural ins...
Thinking about socio-technical
--In a few days I’ll be heading off to the Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems in Ann Arbor, MI. This is the inaugur...
Information Budgets and Shared Cognition
--Compared to some people, I probably appear to be an extreme consumer of information. I follow a few hundred RSS feeds, 60-odd people on Twitter, b...
Information Budgets and Shared Cognition
--Compared to some people, I probably appear to be an extreme consumer of information. I follow a few hundred RSS feeds, 60-odd people on Twitter, b...
Ongoing Analysis of YouTube-Viacom
--News has moved quickly since Wednesday’s ruling by Judge Louis Stanton in Viacom et. al. vs YouTube et. al., the landmark ruling ordering the...
Ongoing Analysis of YouTube-Viacom
--News has moved quickly since Wednesday's ruling by Judge Louis Stanton in Viacom et. al. vs YouTube et. al., the landmark ruling ordering the trans...
Notes on my Fall Class
--This fall I'll be teaching a new course - its title keeps evolving, but we'll be looking at the technologies and processes we use to mediate relati...
Notes on my Fall Class
--This fall I’ll be teaching a new course - its title keeps evolving, but we’ll be looking at the technologies and processes we use to me...
YouTube's Privacy Catastrophe
--In a decision catastrophic to digital privacy rights, a federal judge has ordered that Google turn over the video-consumption histories of all YouT...
YouTube’s Privacy Catastrophe
--In a decision catastrophic to digital privacy rights, a federal judge has ordered that Google turn over the video-consumption histories of all YouT...
Data Portability
--From the Los Angeles Times, a particularly chilling story about social websites and third-party data:Jane Yang, a 30-year-old marketing coordinator...
Google Debuts Personalized Adverts
--From Saul Hansell at the NYT:Google acknowledges that it is now testing ways to use some of the data it has been gathering to better aim search ads...
Google's Ad Planner, TechReview on Web 2.0 and Facebook's Business Network
--A few links for Wednesday morning:The New York Times reports on Google's new Ad Planner, a streamlined analytics client for ad buyers. TechCrunch'...
Web 2.0's Breakpoint
--This was big news Friday, but I'm still processing the fact Joshua Schacter has left Yahoo, and del.icio.us. I've never met Schacter, but I've bee...
Looking for Ning
--Do any employees of Ning read Unit Structures? I've got an issue that isn't getting solved through the normal channels. Rather than writing up a ...
Doug Rushkoff on Obama's Brand
--In the post Obama and the Internet, I discussed the power of Obama's brand. Via techPresident, an essay by academic and critic Douglas Rushkoff ex...
Linking Unit Structures
--Commenting on a few items that have caught my attention:The last few emails I've received from Barack Obama have been accompanied by a short video....
Remembering Paul Otlet
--Today, the NY Times remembers Paul Otlet, someone we've never forgotten in schools of information and library science. Otlet, an information visio...
Obama and the Internet
--This morning, Pew released summary findings from their ongoing study of the Internet and the 2008 election. Alan Rosenblatt's written them up for ...
Mediation and Knowledge
--I've found a moment to read Nick Carr's new piece, Is Google Making us Stupid? I admit to being baited by the title; the article really has little...
Linking Unit Structures
--Interesting links from the past few days:Ed Chi of Xerox PARC recently presented the research talk Enhancing the Social Web through Augmented Socia...
Searching Twitter Better
--My experience watching the percolation of Freedom throughout the web was instructive - a chunk of viral traffic is moving from blogs to Twitter. I...
Linking Unit Structures
--Of course, the day after I say I'm cutting down on blogging I write three posts - what can I say, the internets have been interesting today. A few...
Huge Data Breach at Myspace
--I've not personally verified this, but Valleywag is reporting on a massive data leak from Myspace via Yahoo. From VW:Want to see Paris Hilton's My...
Google's missing privacy policy
--Over the past week, Michael Zimmer has been analyzing Google's odd policy of making you search for its privacy policy. That is, Google - the web's...
Summer 2008
--You really know it's summer when the blog posts start popping up, apologizing in advance for three months of radio silence. Let me join in the fra...
Scaling Social Networks FAQ's
--Thanks to everyone for their interest in the Scaling Social Networks workshop. I wanted to address a few of the questions I've received about the ...
Reminder: Personal Democracy Forum 2008
--I wanted to remind you that my great friends over at techPresident and the Personal Democracy Forum will be putting on the Personal Democracy Forum...
Imagined Identity: Envisioning the Future of Social Networks
--This past weekend, I was in Los Angeles to attend the wonderful HASTAC conference. Highlights included Howard Rheingold's keynote, Curtis Wong's d...
New Manuscript: Integrating Web 2.0 Technologies in the Instructional Process
--For the past two semesters, I've taught a course on Online Social Networks at UNC's School of Information and Library Science. It has been a great...
Announcing the Scaling Social Networks Workshop
--As readers of my blog know, I'm frequently asked to speak about social networks to a wide range of audiences - businesses, research organizations...
Twitter, Imagined Identity and Flux
--I've been meaning to write this post for a while, and thanks to Techcrunch, I've finally got my excuse. TC describes a scheme for making Twitter "...
My Favorite People
--Sen. Obama hooping it up with the Tarheels. Classic pictures! (Click on Photo Gallery, credit Jefferey A. Camarati)Did Tyler get the block? He's ...
New Version of Freedom: v0.3
--In response to a few bug reports and feature requests, I've updated Freedom. The new version should fix the "asking for your password at 5 minute ...
Freedom on MacBreak Weekly
--I just got done listening to MacBreak Weekly - in this week's episode they discuss Freedom! The coverage starts at about 1:01 in. Listen to the e...
ClaimID - New Features and an Update
--This week has been an exciting one over at ClaimID. Working with two great companies - JanRain and Vidoop/Confident, we've introduced some new tec...
Social Networks can't be Bootstrapped
--Via Techcrunch's Erich Schonfeld, Google appears to be moving towards turning iGoogle into its own social network. As Google is notoriously ham-fi...
Two Talks this Week
--Although the semester is winding down, this is looking like a very busy week - my class presents their final projects tomorrow (and we're having cu...
Freedom and Close Networks
--On Friday, I released Freedom, software that fights the oppression of the internet. Incredibly, through the power of del.icio.us, Reddit, Twitter,...
Productive Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom
--A few years ago, I used to judge the quality of a coffeeshop by the speed of its wireless network. Now that I'm working on my dissertation, I find...
Social Software's Curation Era
--For the past few days, I've been playing around with Muxtape. For those who haven't seen it, Muxtape is a website that allows you to create and sh...
Where I've been
--Collection of badges from conferences/workshops I've attended. These are generally ones with lanyards, which I kept hanging over a hook in my offic...
News and Notes: Conferences, Grants and more
--Over at Unit Structures, this has been the week of linking out. Don't fear, overlong psuedo-academic ramblings on social software will come back n...
Wendy Seltzer on Scrabulous' Legal Standing
--Today's recommended post comes from Wendy Seltzer, law professor and fellow at the Berkman Center. In it, Wendy spends some time analyzing the int...
NYT on the Iranian Blogosphere
--Page 3 of the national Sunday NYT featured an interesting article on research being conducted on the Iranian blogosphere by Harvard's Berkman Cente...
Media Unit Strctures: Learning Outside the Box
--I've recently started listening to podcasts of the PRI program To The Best Of Our Knowledge. Unfortunately our affiliate doesn't get the program, ...
Recent SNS Studies
--In the past few weeks, I've come across a number of SNS-related studies. Thought I'd like to them here in case you're interested. I haven't had t...
Fixing Information Overload in Twitter
--As someone who has started or run a few web projects, I'm used to the complaining blogger. And because of that, I try to stay away from being the ...
The Social Filter
--Over on techPresident, I've written a post about the social filter, in response to an article in the NYT that caught my attention. My post is abou...
The Best Social Software
--Over the past few days, I've been discussing the problems of multiple contexts in social software. While I am primarily covering this problem in t...
New Course: Relational Perspectives on CMC
--Sometime last semester, when I had obviously lost my better senses, I agreed to create a new course for Fall 2008. Well, the course is now on the ...
The Perfect Virtual Community
--In yesterday's post about Facebook's new privacy system, I discussed the concept of "community health" in online social networks. This is a topic ...
Facebook's New Privacy Settings: Too little, too late
--This morning, Facebook introduced some fairly significant updates to their privacy controls. Documented in this Facebook blog post, the changes ar...
Practical Unit Structures: BibDesk Importing and Templates
--Over the past few weeks, I've been organizing my citations in preparation for proposal writing. I'm really terrible at the citation-management pro...
Unit Structures Speaking in SF, March 13
--This Thursday, I have the great honor of guest lecturing to David Silver's fantastic, innovative class on Digital Literacy. This semester, David's...
Unit Structures Speaking in SF, March 13
--This Thursday, I have the great honor of guest lecturing to David Silver's fantastic, innovative class on Digital Literacy. This semester, David's...
No Adbusting in Facebook?
--From Nancy Baym, a curious Facebook story:I wrote a few weeks ago about Nick, who has been on a satiric effort to subvert the Facebook Fan concept ...
News and Notes
--A couple quick dispatches:The Berkman Center has posted a video of Clay Shirky's talk from his new book, Here Comes Everybody. I've seen Clay spea...
ASIST SCS Postponed
--Unfortunately, the ASIST Social Computing Summit has been postponed. I wanted to write about it here to clear up any questions or concerns. The r...
iConference wrapup
--I've had a great time here at the iConference; it's been a busy few days, but very rewarding. I've also really enjoyed walking around UCLA's campu...
Google Health: Launch early and iterate?
--Google VP Marissa Mayer has posted some more information about Google Health on the Google Blog. The first bullet point of her post deals with pri...
Unit Structures in Los Angeles
--This week, I'll be in Los Angeles visiting my wonderful sister and attending the 2008 iConference. I'll be attending the Doctoral Colloquium and a...
Google (reading) your health records
--With the announcement of a Google Personal Health Records (PHR) pilot program, the company adds medical records to the gowing dossier of informatio...
Social Computing Summit reminders
--A couple quick reminders about the ASIST Social Computing Summit:The CFP date is February 25, 2008. As long as your abstract is submitted by that ...
Responding: Are social networks good for society?
--Yesterday, I wrote about the Freakonomics blog post that asked if social network sites are good for society. I've had a little time to parse the r...
Are social network sites good for society?
--Tune in to the Freakonomics blog to see what my friends Nicole Ellison and danah boyd have to say. They join Martin Baily, Steve Chazin, Judith Do...
Facebook users - help with our research!
--In the next few weeks, Jacob and I will be running some research on influence and impression management in Facebook. If you're a Facebook user and...
Your house, now searchable
--A few days ago, Google expanded its street view program, adding a bunch of new metro areas. I was both pleased and a little freaked out to find bo...
Bookmarks:
TheStar.com | Canada | Hide IDs in court rulings, privacy chief says
Jennifer Stoddart is proposing radical changes to the long-standing rule that courts are open to public scrutiny. Under the proposal, names and personal information would be removed from judges' decisions and case information posted on the Internet. Initials – "hopefully reversed" – would replace actual names as part of the "anonymizing" process, she said.
David Byrne & Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
The Trouble with Twitter
There are some fundamental misassumptions here
ScienceDirect - Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology : Online social network use, self-esteem, and social capital: A longitudinal analysis
The newest paper from the MSU team
commandN: commandN #143 (August 8th, 2008)
Freedom on CommandN
Writing My Twitter Etiquette Article: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely by Margaret Mason - The Morning News
1. Watch your ratio.
