This past Mother’s Day, I was sitting around the table with my family, digging into a plate of Alaskan Snow Crab legs (what I would consider a nontraditional Mother’s Day brunch). And I was having a hard time of it — I was making a mess, and not really having much luck getting the meat out cleanly.

There’s a trick to eating crab snow crab legs. It’s not a particularly tricky trick — as it turns out, you just *snap* one way, then *snap* the other way, and pull — but I’d forgotten, and it took me a few tries to remember how to do it.

So of course that got me thinking about social media and the social sharing of knowledge.

I didn’t push away from the table to do a quick Web search (I considered it, but I ended up muddling through), but afterwards, I took a look around. Even though I’m a fan of the written word, a demonstration like this clearly calls for video. It doesn’t need to be super-fancy, with multiple angles, off-camera narration, or onscreen annotations — one of the best ones was informal, but instructional, shot with a cameraphone or cheap digicam in a busy seafood place. (You can also see fancier versions, including commercial kitchen technique for speed-cracking Dungeness crab that features good use of slo-mo and graphics.)

The crab-cracking videos are an illustration of how people generally like being helpful and demonstrating their expertise, and how social learning makes it possible for people to contribute their knowledge on topics both mundane and esoteric, practical and trivial.

But what does this prove, other than I’m hungry right now? How does the posting of how-to’s, tutorials and videos on cracking crab, carving turkey like a butcher, folding fitted sheets, disassembling Mossberg 500 shotguns, lacing shoes differently, building $14 Steadycams, and any one of a million other trivial things, make the world a better place?

I think it’s an incremental thing — each one of these trivial wins ultimately adds to the storehouse of total human knowledge. Each new piece of knowledge has the potential to help someone, and because it’s placed somewhere  browseable, searchable, and findable by others on an on-demand, even mobile, basis, it means that people are more likely to find the knowledge they need, when it will be most useful to them.

What’s more, there’s no incremental cost — the tutorial on how to on iron a shirt doesn’t displace the plans for affordable Third World solar ovens, any more than ridiculously detailed explanations of lightsaber combat detracts from the usefulness of the Web at large.

(I do worry sometimes that the group mind will dumb us down and make us so dependent on the shared hive mind that we’re unable to function as individuals without it. Though that ground’s been covered pretty thoroughly in science fiction and I won’t revisit it now.)

In closing, I do want to call back to my January entry on being useful by sharing your expertise and remind businesses that sharing useful knowledge is good — being helpful can help you. Even if it’s for something “trivial.”

Got your own thoughts on the social sharing of knowledge? Leave a comment below.

Doing interviews in your blog is, by all accounts, a good way to get content. You can use interviews to bring in alternate voices; do something new, interesting, and even useful; and maybe get some attention (and even a little link love) from people more prominent than yourself.

I myself haven’t really ever blogged an interview before. I’ve done plenty of paraphrasing, and used direct quotes, but nothing I’d call a full-on interview. Perhaps I’m too in love with the sound of my own voice. In any case, I’m going to blog my own journey of discovery, wherein I will use my own variation of the Socratic Method (wherein I bother people with dumb questions until they get tired of me) to get tips and pointers on how to do an interview for your small business blog. So this will probably be a series of entries.

First up is our own Jill Foster, who shares the following interview tips. (Even though we talk all the time, the following is from an e-mail exchange):

Can you share with me a few tips that you’ve learned when you do interviews?

“When recording audio or video: Create a sense of ease with the interviewee with the mic or camera rolling. Start the conversation off-topic with some small talk (if this is a comfortable style for you), or a compliment of their work, and/or an appreciation for their invested interview time. This lubricates the conversational mind and confidence.

When cutting a promo video with a CEO a while back, he was nervous. (As in a lot.) He decompressed significantly after talking about his kids for 10 minutes on camera before we launched into our interview.”

Also with regard to audio or video,

“Inform and direct… with respect: Relay the questions before the date of recording, and feel free to tell the interviewee what you envision (or want to emphasize) for your conversation i.e. ‘Sam, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m really interested in this part of your story: you’re a registered Democrat but your team is 60% Republican….’”

On technology:

“I’ve enjoyed good experiences with Audio Hijack in conjunction with Skype to conduct the interview and record (which can be imported and easily edited in iMovie or other editing platforms; I just happen to use iMovie more steadily).”

On choosing a line of questioning:

“Combine emotional and more structural questions regarding your interviewee’s business.  Ask not only ‘How they developed “x” initiative,’ but also what their most favored aspect of their business is. What gets them on fire?  Asking questions with a varied tack can help you recognize where your subject is most forthcoming, most confident, and what most sparks their interest.”

A suggestion for a good staple question:

“It’s useful to ask “What was a question you wish we would’ve addressed that I didn’t ask?”

**************

Thanks, Jill, for those interview tips.

As noted, this was all from an e-mail exchange. Some people prefer doing e-mail interviews, and it’s my natural tendency, but you can lose some of that iteration and back-and-forth that you get from a verbal interview, or even over IM and Twitter. So as I progress, I hope to add in audio, or even video (as appropriate). Stay tuned.

Have you incorporated interviews into your small business blog? Leave a comment and share a lesson you’ve learned or a tip you’d like to pass along.

Many people are familiar with the “how to” sites out there like WonderHowTo.com, eHow.com and ExpertVillage. These sites offer a variety of cool and sometimes funny videos on how to make things, perform certain tasks or make like easier for you.

In a similiar vein, we here at Network Solutions decided that there were some things that might be worth taking a more simplified approach to, technology-wise. In this video below, the narrator explains why a small business would want to be online and the things they will need to have to get online and look professional. This includes a domain name or web presence, a web site, e-mail using your business domain, hosting of the web site at a secure and reliable data center for a start.

I would recommend all of you out there thinking about taking your business online to watch this video. Also, most of you who found this web site are probably online in some fashion or another, so think of this as a review or refresher. Who knows, you might learn something you never thought of or realize you need to find a good partner to help you with your online business.

Video created by Creative Alliance www.cre8.com/