Super Tuesday became a tech tour de force for the UpTake

Julio Ojeda-Zapata writes, Technology A to Z - With easy, affordable tools, anyone can be a video journalist:

Mobile phones. The video cameras in newer cell phones have become live-reporting tools, courtesy of new services that send moving images over the Internet as they're being captured. These services include Qik, Kyte, ComVu and Flixwagon. When paired with certain cutting-edge handsets, such as Nokia's N95, video journalism becomes possible.

Reuters has paired N95s with the ComVu service as part of a Mobile Journalism Toolkit experiment. Minnesota-based Technology Evangelist, which specializes in Web-based video coverage of technology topics, used Qik for live reporting from the Consumer Electronics Show late last year. During the recent Super Tuesday of U.S. presidential primaries and caucuses, MTV sponsored 51 citizen journalists using phones equipped with Flixwagon.

Likewise, the UpTake has harnessed Qik with several N95s for live webcasting on the group's home page. It accomplished this with a first-ever melding of Qik with Mogulus, which permitted N95-packing UpTake correspondents in St. Paul and Boston to zap their video directly to that little window on the group's home page.

Super Tuesday became a tech tour de force for the UpTake.

Chuck Olsen was in a New Orleans bar during Mardi Gras celebrations (Super Tuesday and Fat Tuesday happened to coincide this year), webcasting live via Mogulus and the iSight videocam built into his MacBook Pro laptop. This permitted him to co-anchor the UpTake's national coverage of that night's political mega-event (despite a few technical glitches) alongside volunteers in St. Paul.

UpTake executive director Jason Barnett was in St. Paul with one of the organization's two N95s, transmitting footage of inner-city Democratic caucusing. Video blogger Steve Garfield had the other N95 in Boston, transmitting from a bar near Fenway Park as he solicited the political views of fellow tech-heads. This event was a technical coup for Garfield, a veteran Qik user, who negotiated the agreement between Mogulus and Qik so the services could interact for the first time.