#23 Is This Really End? Or Just the Beginning....

For me the QL L2.0 program is truly eye-opening. It is a wake-up call to find out how far away I am from the virtual world now. I was active for a few years over ten years ago, but since then I stopped exploring and climbing. Of the 231/2 Things I learned a lot new from each of them.

First of all, the tool for our program, blogging of the blogger.com, is so powerful and easy to use, and its user-friendly dashboard is much better than the control panels of some website hosting companies and the blogging pages are free. That said, I found that blogging can be vulnerable to hackers/mischievous behaviors or damages accidentally done by the blog hosting company workers. This happened to my blog. The pictures on the "Rockefeller Estate Slideshow" were all randomly taken by the the slide widget of the template from the photos in the Rockefeller Estate set" of my flickr.com account. These pictures were taken by myself during a visit to the estate this summer. However, since about ten days ago I found an extra one added to them, the picture of a green man with scarf. When sherwood living library page is loaded, the green man picture is the first slide. This is not a major damage to my blog pages, but the particular green-color human figure gives me a horrible chilly feeling (Remember Halloween ghosts' faces all painted green?). Does anyone know whose picture it could be?

If it was a paid website, a complaint can be filed to the hosting company, and they can correct it. But it is not possible for blogging because in the Terms of Services Google says, "Google disclaims all responsibility and liability for the availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Service or any other client software." Therefore we cannot do anything about it other than deleting the slideshow. Has anyone else experienced any security problems?

In spite of the accident I still love blogging, the convenience to upload articles and pictures is super, no FTP tools are necessary. For amateur Internet users like me, blogging is more than enough, and I do not believe serious hackers are interested in my blog pages.

I tried each of the tools in the QL L2.0 program, my favorites are wikipedia and its sister projects such as wikibooks, wikiquotes and others; and its outsider applications such as library application libsuccess.org, wikihow.com, wiki.answers.com and many others; some of the outsider applications are nonprofit, some commercial. The folksonomies concept and practice, the wiki ways of collaboration in gathering knowledge are amazingly successful; and millions of people are using it and learning from them. Other tools and exercises I found very useful for our library and daily life convenience are RSS feeds, LibraryThing, flickr, online videos, and online office tools.

The QL L2.0 Team has done everything possible to assist us finishing each Thing, I found all the tips are very timely posted and useful. The Team leader and members are the heroes of the project and we, the participants, benefited so much from their hard work behind the scene. I believe this investment decision made by the top management of our library system is wise and rewarding to the whole system operation. I am now feeling better equipped and armed with new tech ideas and practice/experience when sitting at the Reference Desk (not changed to the "Information Desk", we are not yet a CSM yet in Hb). I hope the QL L2.0 Team will be a permanent one (not to dissolve after this program) to give guidance on new technology applications. The Team's job is different from the ITS office in that ITS mainly install and maintain hardware and software; their Help Desk is a questions-and-anwere office; while the QL L Team is to aggressively promote library applications that arise from Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 development. I will certainly participate in any similar programs coming in the future.