Getting the basics on getting by

Want to learn how to hang pictures or the perfect way to kiss? Then go online, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

Among the many benefits of the internet, universal access to knowledge has to figure large. So, do you know how to give the perfect, passionate kiss? Maybe you need a "how-to" on tying a Windsor knot. Or your knowledge-gap might be as mundane as discovering how to change the battery in your iPod or sawing a piece of wood.

From kissing to juggling, making soda bread or champ, a new generation of video websites has answers to problems you may not have realised you had. The question their voluminous advice poses is, how did we cope before? Did we at some point get dumber? "I don't think it's to do with a shortfall in education," says Danny Kelly, creative director of leading how-to video site VideoJug (www.videojug.com). "We're all aware of what we don't know and now, through the internet, we have the means to address that." Paul Moriarty heads up the student counselling and development service at University College Cork. Has he noticed young people arriving at third-level education any way less competent in basic skills than in the past? "We get students coming to us with quite serious problems from wondering if they are on the right course, to academic motivation to people feeling low and, at the extreme, suicidal," says Moriarty. "There's a challenge also to get institutions to factor in life-skills training as part of the curriculum. Students who arrive here in the first year are more so than before still carrying the burden of acquiring the points required to get to university, and it's evident in their isolation, perhaps."

VideoJug and competitor website ViewDo (www.viewdo.com) seem to be fulfilling a real need. "What will your former employer say about you?" asks "career concierge" Rikke Hansen in one of a series of VideoJug shows that helps job hunters explore questions that might arise in an interview. Each poses typical but daunting interview questions and offers advice on how to answer.

"How To Kiss Someone Passionately" has been viewed 317,587 times, actually 317,600 by the time I finished researching this article (it contains the immortal line: "You may wish to use the tip of your tongue"), which suggests an extraordinary degree of hunger for apparently intuitive tasks.

How-to videos with instructions for everyday life are a new but growing area of the internet-content business. VideoJug has only been running for seven months and already hosts 2,500 videos. "We've had about 600,000 unique visitors so far," says Kelly, "and we're up to around 100,000 a month on the toughest metrics, and increasing, so it's going very well." The people behind VideoJug have already tasted internet success with Football365, a sports site that launched in the early days of the internet in the 1990s.

Broadband is increasing the attraction of the internet for video publishing and distribution. In the US, broadband has penetrated the market faster in one year than cable television did in 20 years. That too suggests that the new formats populating the internet, primarily ultra-short videos, have a compelling appeal.

By the same token, short videos are far easier than half-hour videos for the non-professional to make. The latter needs narrative construction, the former can be done to a formula by amateurs - half of VideoJug's videos come from its users.

THERE IS AN ADDITIONAL factor that favours this form of video. Erik Lumer, chief executive of Dublin-based internet TV distributor Babelgum explains: "Most content is locked up in rights issues. There is a long value chain of who owns the rights to different parts of a television programme." That makes many television programmes almost impossible to show on the web without a lot of hard work and residual fee payments.

So for now rights-free practical information videos are in a fast-growing genre that suits user, producer and distributor. They are also seeping into more mainstream internet sites.

One of the most eminent internet communities, iVillage, now runs a series of videos based on vox-pop interviews with members of the public, providing answers to common questions. For example: do men change their view of women who sleep with them on the first date? Surprise or no surprise, the majority of men interviewed found many different ways to say yes. And it mattered.

The new services can also address temporary skills deficits. "There's a larger number of mature students now coming into university who are stressed and they're juggling many different responsibilities and there can be slippage in all the basic areas: sleeping, eating, exercising," says UCC's Paul Moriarty, whose department has introduced development courses to help students acquire basic life skills.

The audience for how-to videos is split roughly 50-50 between men and women, and the broad range of subjects on offer reflects that. As many 50-year-olds as 15-year-olds are making use of the VideoJug site.

"Practical life skills are important across the age range," cautions Moriarty, though he draws particular attention to the 16-18 age group, which may well be missing out on critical life-skills training.

"The internet provides us with a potentially huge audience," says VideoJug's Danny Kelly. "The economics are right and it is exciting to investors." But the need for VideoJug, ViewDo and similar sites might also be sending out a message we'd do well to heed. In a sophisticated modern society, a person's most pressing need is ironically for information on the very basics of getting by.