Al@din is a Dutch site, maintained by Dutch public libraries. Through an online question service, people can find answers to questions. Answers provided by public librarians. Habbo Hotel is some kind of meeting place/chat room for kids. People. Apparently they can use credits to expan their character or rooms or whatever. I never looked into it. The only reason I know of its existence, is because I got a lot of people begging for codes for an online payment system, after my experiment. This is even the only post with closed comments because of this. But I digress.

In an attempt to increase visibility of Al@din, there was a competition planned in cooperation with the Dutch Habbo site. Kids could earn Habbo credits by visiting or using Al@din. However, the action got cancelled prematurely, due to the extreme success. Participating Dutch libraries found out that there were way too many questions generated from this competition, creating problems for the people staffing the Al@din service. Al@din questions are answered by library staff from many different libraries, each taking their turn on certain dates. This means that on average, the actual number of people available to answer questions is probably very limited. To prevent further problems, the action was cancelled and that was that.

Makes me wonder what would happen if kids actually started to use the public library again, like kids before them may have done. Would this cause a major problem for public libraries, in this Internet era? I have a feeling it would.