Spent a great evening last night at the San Francisco Symphony. Kevin Smokler, author of Bookmark Now, organized a bloggers night, and a dozen of us had dinner at Arlequin and then met up with another dozen or so bloggers at Davies Symphony Hall.

It was only my second time at Davies, one of the nation’s most stunning symphony halls, and somehow we wound up with killer seats in the orchestra section, 14 rows from center stage. I hadn’t been to a symphony performance since seeing the great Itzhak Perlman at Lincoln Center in Manhattan a few years back.

On this night, an animated associate conductor James Gaffigan (pictured above) led the 70-member chamber in a sublime performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture from Romeo and Juliet, followed by the passion and pathos of Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, Opus 20.  Both were the kind of accessible, lite summer fare that tends to bring in wider audiences during the symphony’s "Summer in the City" performances.

Things became more challenging, and interesting, after intermission, when guest pianist Gabriela Martinez lit up the keyboard with a precise, exquisite rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Opus 30. 

A highlight came during intermission, when Gaffigan and horn player Jonathan Ring came by the press room and answered questions from the bloggers. I asked Gaffigan how the programs are chosen, and he said he tends to pick accessible pieces for the summer series while music director Michael Tilson Thomas tends to favor more complex works during the regular season.

Someone asked Ring about the horn section being outnumbered by the violins, and he answered playfully, "We can bury the violins at will." And then, more seriously, "It’s all about balance."

All in all, an exquisite evening, and I’ll be back soon. If you haven’t been to a performance recently — and for our bloggers corps, half had never been to Davies before — here’s how you can. They have a kids site as well. The symphony will give a free concert on Aug. 24 at Yerba Buena Gardens and then they’re off for three weeks of performances in Europe.

Spectrum Online: Mark Cuban: YouTube is doomed. Excerpt:

  Cuban: … So much of YouTube’s  success and model is based on the safe harbor—which  seems really slippery. … If you [consider] the safe harbor, I don’t think YouTube is a service  provider. Two, it says that if you are aware of infringement, you have got to do something about it—and how can they not be aware of this? Three, it says that if you benefit financially from it, then you are liable.  Well, there are banner ads everywhere, there’s your infringing equipment.

IEEE Spectrum: Where do you see YouTube 10 years from now?

Cuban: They are gone. They will be rolled right into Google Video,   and Google Video will have ways to evaluate the video  before it’s posted, and that will be fine. And maybe YouTube URLs will redirect to Google Video. If anything, if I’m wrong, and the safe harbor laws apply, then I’ll  create a business leveraging that. Because if safe harbor laws might apply, and YouTube chooses to limit  their file sizes to 100 megabits—I will limit file sizes to 100 terabits! Let’s see what kind of good stuff we can have.

I believe Cuban means megabytes and terabytes. But, interesting prediction.

At Pixelodeon last month I had a chance to chat with Sari Gelser, news editor of Truthout.org, a distributed citizen news network that’s doing important work.

Here’s our 3-minute video interview:

MPEG-4 video at 640×480 | Ourmedia page

Flash version on Internet Archive

MPEG-4 or Flash version at 320×240 on Blip.tv

How is the Internet reshaping our ideas about organizing information — and, in many ways, our ideas about organizing our lives? One of our keenest cultural observers, David Weinberger, helps frame the discussion in illuminating ways in his new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

I’ve seen David enthrall audiences at Harvard and at NewComm Forum in Las Vegas, and if I could find a way to get paid for blogging his talks, I happily would. (A caveat: David is a colleague and friend, and I did a hallway video interview with him about his book in March here.)

In Miscellaneous, Weinberger — who wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto before this — lays out a sort of epistemology of the information age, holding up a lens to  help us make sense of the new ways in which we are ordering and classifying the world around us.

He lays out his thesis this way:

From management structures to encyclopedias, to the courses of study we put our children through, to the way we decide what’s worth believing, we have organized our ideas with principles designed for use in a world limited by the laws of physics.

Suppose that now, for the first time in history, we are able to arrange our concepts without the silent limitations of the physical. How might our ideas, organizations, and knowledge itself change?

As a fellow friend, Ethan Zuckerman, writes on Amazon.com: "[The book is] about the shape of knowledge, and how moving information from paper to the web changes how we organize and how we think. … At its heart, the book is about what happens when we liberate knowledge from the world of atoms."

In one chapter, the author surveys the "weirdly out of date" Dewey Decimal Classification system, whose  century-old requirements seems to put a straitjacket around major new disciplines while consigning venerable religions like Buddhism to a lesser order because of the system’s built-in shortcomings. "The Dewey Decimal Classification system can’t be fixed because knowledge itself is unfixed," he writes. "Knowledge is diverse, changing, imbued with the cultural values of the moment. The world is too diverse for any single classification system to work for everyone in every culture at every time."

Wikipedia, the people’s encyclopedia, comes in for a thorough examination. How can this extraordinary example of democratic mob rule possibly work? Partly because it is blatantly transparent about its messy inner workings. As Weinberger notes, "Wikipedia provides the metadata surrounding an article — edits, discussions, warnings, links to other edits by the contributors — because it expects the reader to be actively involved, alert to the signs. … Deciding what to believe is now our burden."

Weinberger brings up familiar themes: of the decentralized nature of the Internet, of the Web as "a permission-free zone," of Flickr and tagging and the value of bottom-up, loosely coupled metadata.

He posits a not-too-distant day when electronic books will have a living memory, when readers will be able to see "the passages most often reread by poets, A students, professors of literature, or Buddhist priests. … We will be able to see what books our town is reading and which books our town has abandoned halfway through. Reading will cease being a one-way activity."

These kinds of observations infuse many of the book’s chapters, though by book’s end I was hoping for a Grand Theory of the Miscellaneous Everything, a connecting of the metadata dots that the author so skillfully lays out. What are the ramifications of this overarching trend for our arts, our industries, our politics, our culture?

I don’t have as much time as I once did to read books, but a recent cross-country plane ride was well spent, as I had in hand a book that changed how I think about the way the world works.

See David’s Everything Is Miscellaneous blog.

Order the book at these online retailers.

See my other book reviews.

Do video producers and video bloggers need to obtain a right-of-publicity/model release form from the subjects of their videos if they plan on using the video commercially (including making money from ads)?

I posed the question to San Francisco attorney Colette Vogele at the recent Web Video Summit in San Jose, and then caught up with her in the hallway to capture her answer in this 3-minute video interview taken with a Nokia N-95 cell phone.

Ourmedia page | watch MPEG-4 video

Suffering from iPhone lust? While the media have been abuzz over Steve Jobs’ so-called Jesus phone, Nokia has recently released a fabulous gizmo that’s actually a much better phone.

It’s the Nokia N95.

As a member of the Nokia bloggers program, I’ve had fun over the past year testing out the latest cool toys that the Finnish company has dangled in the U.S. marketplace. Liked the N91 and N70. Found the N73 and N80 handy. Loved the N93 and N90.

But I adore the N95, which sets a new standard for gotta-have-it mobile eye candy and rockin’ features, even if its interface still needs work.

In the Silicon Valley circles I run in these days, I’ve begun spotting the N95 with increasing frequency. Dan Gillmor has one. So do videobloggers Andrew Baron of Rocketboom in New York and Steve Garfield of Boston.

I decided to pass on the iPhone because the N95 and my MacBook Pro meet my mobile wireless needs (for now), so I can’t do a true side-by-side comparison. But here is how their features stack up:

Phone features

Nokia N95: You have a full choice of carriers, and the N95 supports 3G, which is a huge advantage over AT&T’s Edge. The device is smaller and lighter than an iPhone (4.2 oz. to the iPhone’s 4.8 oz.) and conveniently slips into a shirt pocket.

iPhone: You’re locked into AT&T and its pokey Edge service for two years, a poor experience for downloading multimedia files. And it takes four to six steps to place a simple phone call.

Multimedia

Nokia N95: The N95 is helping to usher in an age of citizen media, with video captured in MPEG-4 at a big, fat 640 x 480 pixels. These videos look good! Here’s my interview (taped indoors) with attorney Colette Vogele, done on an N95.

It also takes good photos, especially outdoors, in 5 megapixels up to 2592 x 1944 pixels.

iPhone: You can watch video on its luscious 3.5-inch screen in glorious H.264 MPEG-4. But you can’t shoot video. You can, however, take pictures with its 2-megapixel camera.

Other features

Nokia N95: The N95 plays music decently with a headset, though I’ll admit I haven’t spent time trying to figure out how to transfer my mp3s onto the device. Web browsing is something I frankly don’t do on a cellphone screen. The gadget also sports an alarm clock, a mapping service and other nice little extras.  The N95 also supports texting, instant messaging, visual radio and even video telephony. You can slip a big microSD memory card (not included) into the memory slot, and its battery won’t need servicing after a year. Finally, the N95 has GPS (tied to the mapping service, covering most of the globe), though I haven’t spent time trying to figure out how to use it.

iPhone: Web browsing on a decent-size screen is, to me, the iPhone’s killer app. Being able to call up an entire web page and zoom in on the story you want with a flick of the finger is nothing less than a revolutionary advance. Naturally, the iPhone doubles as an iPod and lets you play mp3s and AAC music files. The iPhone has texting but no instant messaging.

Coolness factor

Nokia N95: The N95 has a cool factor all its own, with a pleasant little jolt that signals the phone is ready to use. Awesome glowing blue buttons. Wonderful form factor: generous-size screen that slips open to expose the numeric keypad for dialing.

iPhone: Steve Jobs is God in a mock turtleneck. Can’t get much cooler than that.

Price

Nokia N95: Sells for about $700 (see Froogle).

iPhone: Retails for $499 (4GB) and $599 (8GB).

JD Lasica is a former columnist for Engadget. Have you used an N95 or iPhone? Add your own observations.