I’ve been a mem­ber of the Nokia blog­gers pro­gram for a few months now, and I’ve got to say it’s great fun to be part of this effort and work­ing with for­mer jour­nal­ist Andy Abram­son and the Com­mu­ni­cano team. (Nokia sends me cell phones to use and blog about, no strings other than my agree­ing to write about the devices.) Here are some of my ear­lier reviews:

• A look at the Nokia N91

• Nokia’s gotta-have-it phones: N90 and N70

And here is my still-evolving archive of Nokia mobile video clips, includ­ing this inter­view in Swe­den I did with my Nokia N90 (because I wasn’t about to lug my cam­corder along), plus some Flickr pho­tos I shot with my Nokia N90 and N93.

I’m not the first with a review of the N93 — I like to give my phones a long test drive before mak­ing any rec­om­men­da­tions. But I’ve become pretty attached to this sleek new gizmo.

A great phone for cit­i­zen journalists

Here’s Nokia’s page about the N93, plus the blog­gers page about the N93. (When Dan Gill­mor eyed mine, he said, “Hot damn, I need one of those!”)

The most impor­tant thing I can say about Nokia’s N Series is this: The N93 is help­ing to usher in the cit­i­zen media move­ment in a major way. No one wants to watch grainy, out-of-focus, low-res pic­tures and videos. With the N93, you don’t have to. It cap­tures video as MPEG-4 files in a big, fat, gor­geous 640x480 display.

Peo­ple are still get­ting used to tak­ing video with their mobiles, and Steve Garfield points out that even ABCNews.com can’t get it right.

Steve should know. He and Rocketboom’s Andrew Baron (who showed me how to move clips from my N93 to my Mac lap­top using Blue­tooth) have been my main go-to guys about these devices.

I bumped into Steve at the recent Video on the Net con­fer­ence and we com­pared our N93s. Said Steve: “It’s a great device for cap­tur­ing and shar­ing a fleet­ing moment. Who wants to lug a cam­corder around all day? This lets you cap­ture events that you would have oth­er­wise missed out on in our always-on video culture.”

I still have the bad habit of want­ing to edit my video clips in a ded­i­cated video edi­tor, like iMovie, but Steve showed me how to use the N93’s built-in video edi­tor (under Options / Edit). It took him less than 15 min­utes, rid­ing the train in Boston, to mas­ter the technique.

Zack Rosen shot this video snip­pet of me and Dan Gill­mor talk­ing about the recently launched Prin­ci­ples of Cit­i­zen Jour­nal­ism project. And here’s a video I shot of Britt Bravo on my loaner N93 at the Social Media Con­sen­sus gath­er­ing last month.

It’s a lit­tle bit bulky to be car­ry­ing around all the time, a draw­back Nokia will no doubt fix as its N Series line matures. And it doesn’t han­dle low-light shoot­ing sit­u­a­tions very well for either pho­tos or video. The inter­face also can be daunt­ing — I still don’t know the eas­i­est way to check my missed calls after it alerts me and the mes­sage goes away. (Nokia, take some words of wid­som from Henry David Thoreau: Sim­plify, simplify.)

Hav­ing said that, the N93 has res­cued me on numer­ous occa­sions. When some­one says, “Too bad nobody brought a cam­corder,” I like to whip out this baby and reply, “Oh, yeah?”

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Steve Rubel: ABCNews.com Relaunches with Cit­i­zen Journalism.

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Just got back from the annual Record­ing Acad­emy Hon­ors din­ner and silent auc­tion held by the San Fran­cisco chap­ter of the National Acad­emy of Record­ing Arts & Sci­ences, which holds the Gram­mys. As usual, it was a rol­lick­ing, enter­tain­ing night (sat at the Out­hink Media table). Last year, Green Day, Dave Brubeck and Taj Mahal were hon­ored or enter­tained. Tonight it was Sammy Hagar, three-time Grammy win­ner Narada Michael Walden (the dummer-producer-writer-arranger), and songwriter/producer Linda Perry, who co-wrote or pro­duced songs for Gwen Ste­fani, Christina Aguil­era, Pink, Jewel and Ali­cia Keys, among oth­ers. Bumped into my friend Kevin Smok­ler, too. Great fun, great music, and lots of love in the room, but, as usual, no pho­tos or video allowed.

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For­rester Research’s six kinds of social media activ­ity or participation.

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I made the cover of the Sun­day San Jose Mer­cury News’ Per­spec­tive sec­tion. No, not for an arti­cle I wrote. It’s a YouTube image (Joe Biden responds to JD Lasica) accom­pa­ny­ing the lead story, The YouTube fac­tor.

We’ll have an announce­ment in the next month about a new ini­tia­tive around grass­roots video that may prove just as sig­nif­i­cant in the 2008 elec­tions as the YouTube factor.

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What an incred­i­ble load of crap, but no sur­prise, given the source: right-wing blowhard Joseph Farah: There would be no “blo­gos­phere” with­out the inspi­ra­tion of Matt Drudge
of the Drudge Report, writes  Farah in the new book,
“Stop the Presses!” Few of today’s 72 mil­lion blog­gers have any­thing in com­mon with Drudge, or any­thing to thank him for.

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Pam Gaulin at a site I hadn’t heard about until recently, Asso­ci­ated Con­tent: Are Ethics Miss­ing in Cit­i­zen Jour­nal­ism? How to write and report responsibly.

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Amy Gahran at E-Media Tid­bits:

[On Thurs­day] a flock of Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates [took] the stage
in Orange­burg, S.C. for the first debate of the 2008 elec­tion sea­son.
As I noted ear­lier,
NBC affil­i­ates will be tele­vis­ing the live debate, with a stream­ing
web­cast on MSNBC.com. Those orga­ni­za­tions will, as far as I under­stand
it, own the copy­right to that footage.

How­ever, in today’s “remix
cul­ture” — where peo­ple increas­ingly expect and want to be able to
grab video clips for com­men­tary, dis­cus­sion, and even remix­ing and
par­ody — does it make sense for a key part of the small-“d”-democratic
process to basi­cally be locked down by copy­right? Look at it this way:
Gov­ern­ment pub­li­ca­tions can­not be copy­righted. There­fore, why should
video cov­er­age of government-related events such as can­di­date debates
be sub­ject to copyright?

Obvi­ously, copy­right law won’t change quickly. How­ever, it
might be pos­si­ble for the lead­er­ship of the nation’s two major par­ties
to pave the way to bring forth­com­ing debates more fully into remix
culture.

Stan­ford law pro­fes­sor Lawrence Lessig (a lead­ing archi­tect and advo­cate of Cre­ative Com­mons licens­ing) is tack­ling this thorny issue. He’s call­ing on the pub­lic
to con­tact the lead­ers of the Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­tic National
Com­mit­tees to “elim­i­nate unnec­es­sary reg­u­la­tion of polit­i­cal speech.”

Specif­i­cally,
Lessig’s ask­ing the RNC and DNC to promise to “require of any net­work
broad­cast­ing Pres­i­den­tial debates (at least) that they license the
debates freely after they are ini­tially broad­cast — either by putting
the debates into the pub­lic domain, or by per­mit­ting any­one to use or
remix the con­tents of those debates, for any rea­son what­so­ever, so long
as there is attri­bu­tion back to any pur­ported copy­right holder (CC-BY).” (Here’s the press release.)

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TV Week: Social media is poised to be the next big oppor­tu­nity for tele­vi­sion net­works as they extend their brands and video fur­ther online.

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Mark Glaser at Media Shift: Would you stop using YouTube if they inserted ads in videos?

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