Activity

Wordfence automatically blocks IP addresses that repeatedly attempt to brute-force logins on UCalgaryBlogs. After a few attempts, they aren't able to try again for a few minutes (in case it's a legitimate person trying to log in, it doesn't banish them entirely right away). If they knock it off, the ban gets lifted. If they keep hammering, the ban gets escalated, eventually putting them in a permanent penalty box (identified by their IP address - not perfect, but it's all we have).

[caption id="attachment_24686" align="aligncenter" width="1228"] Blocked logins by country, August 8-22, 2016[/caption]

I was half tempted to just drop the ban-hammer on the entire country of Russia, but we have students there (and I wouldn't want to anger Putin or his tiny-handed American mouthpiece). The US? Buffalo appears to be one of the biggest sources of spam bots - colocated servers (compromised? rented by spammers?) are a big chunk of the attacks we get.

Alec Couros posted a quick throwaway on Facebook (I'd link to it, but Facebook doesn't work that way)

It got a lot of likes, and then the comment thread kind of exploded. I posted several comments and replies, and realized that was a silly way to post that particular discussion because it's exactly the kind of thing we are talking about as killing blogging and personal publishing.

I've pulled my comments together below. They're from various bits in the conversation, so don't necessarily flow as a single post. Whatever.

I've been thinking about the web we lost a LOT lately, but keep having a nagging feeling that some of it is nostalgia and romanticizing the good parts while overlooking the less good. I think we should learn from what was good (and so, so much was very good), learn from what wasn't as good, and move forward to build new goodness on modern tech.

I don't miss Reader. There are alternatives. I miss interesting people publishing coherent posts on diverse topics, rather than scattered like birdshot splattered across disconnected algorithmic streams on corporate silos.

I've been digging Medium. Haven't posted anything there, but it seems like a great mix of people and ideas (if a little heavy on the entrepreneur-fu articles). But I wonder what will happen to all of the posts after Verizon/Nokia/Facebook/Google buy it (eventually. It's the exit strategy of every web company on the planet now). Will it be shuttered? Improved? Stagnate and die?

Reader isn't the problem. People just stopped owning their words, publishing on their own websites. The internet archive for the last 5 years or so will largely be a gaping hole of dark matter where corporate silos like Facebook used to be.

And if someone didn't have tech skills, they didn't have a voice. And if they didn't want to put their thoughts out on the open web (where they could be used out of context, doxxed, harassed, etc) they weren't part of the conversation. There were reasons why the blogosphere (even the edublogosphere and openblogosphere) was dominated by white male professionals.

Readership is down by a few orders of magnitude as well. Back in the olden days, I often had thousands of people reading posts. Now, maybe 100 on a really busy day. Not sure what that means - I cross-post to Facebook and twitter, so I assume people just read the snippets there and don't click through to read the full thing. Summary blurbs, short attention span, moving on…

A million times, this:

You hear a lot of talk about information overload, but I don't feel the amount of information is the problem. For me, the problem comes in with the emotional investment demanded by real-time, and the ultimate toll it can take on your productivity, or just general happiness and well-being. You can see this play out in everything from expectations that you should respond to emails, all the way to social network memes getting your attention when it comes to the election, or for me personally, the concerns around security and privacy using technology.

Source: Working To Avoid The Drowning Effects Of Real Time ·

I've definitely been feeling this fatigue more lately. Describing it as a "real-time toll" is a good way to look at it. It's definitely not information overload - it's sensory and emotional overload as a result of a flood of realtime demands on attention and connection.

I am actively reducing the number of real-time platforms/connections/whatevers that I pay attention to, and am actively trying to do as much as I can on my own schedule. RSS is on my schedule. Checking and responding to email is on my schedule. Twitter/Facebook/etc are more real-time environments, so I'm reducing the amount of time I spend there.

Update: the Related Posts feature pulled up this post from 2008. "Real-time toll" is a perfect way to describe what I was getting at back then:

Every time I read an update by someone that I care about, I think about that person – if only for a second – and my sense of connection is strengthened.

I'm (Slowly) re-reading Future Shock, and Toffler touches on some of this, in a book written in 1970. Suddenly, we come into contact with more people in a week/day/hour than people typically would in a lifetime not that long ago. we're still coping with that shift as a society.

This fits in nicely with what (Patrick and I) were talking about last week, with individual-as-atomic-unit vs. individual-as-connected-self. Atomic-unit relies on real-time streams to keep "informed" and "up to date" on what is going on. Connected-self may be able to have a slower, more deliberate pace while relying on connections with others to keep informed etc?