JEFF JARVIS points to this New York Times story on the role of small, portable video cameras in letting the U.S. military bypass media operations to get its stories out. The story reads like a commercial for the Sony PD 150 camera, which is unfortunate for Sony as I think it’s been discontinued.

I think that the trend it describes is likely to continue, and I hope that more bloggers use video for newsgathering. People keep writing and asking me for advice on this, and I’m not sure that I’m any great expert. But for web video, quality isn’t an overriding concern. That’s good, because cameras like the Canon GL-2 — which I own, and which produces really beautiful video — are expensive. (And I was just doing some side-by-side comparisions with my perfectly-respectable Sony Digital 8 camera, and the difference is quite astounding — but then the Canon costs three times as much, and has a terrific fluorite lens).

But if I were doing web video, I’d prefer the Sony. It’s smaller, and lighter, and cheaper — which means less worry about it getting stolen or broken — and it actually has a lot of web-useful features. It will, like most Sonys, record MPEG video to a memory stick, so you don’t have to do fancy firewire video capture; you can just import it into a computer via USB. It also has rudimentary built-in editing and titling features. I’ve never used them, and probably never will, but if I were somewhere out of the way, I could edit a video down, save it to MPEG, and import it into pretty much any computer using USB, then upload it to the web without even compressing it further. Rough and ready, but it would work.

There are smaller video cameras, though you pay for their smallness. I think that this is the one Doc Searls uses, and it’s a pretty good still camera, too. But it’s harder to hold these small cameras steady, and at $1500 a pop it’s kind of expensive.

I encourage people who are interested in mobile videoblogging for the web to just try to pick a digital still camera that does video with sound. The camera that Zeyad uses will do that. So will the Toshiba that I use. They only cost a few hundred bucks, and work fine for the web.

Within a year or so, of course, cellphones will do all of this stuff, and pretty well. The real business opportunity will be for someone who can knit all this stuff together and produce an interesting news operation that integrates video reportage from all sorts of distributed sources everywhere. I don’t know who will pull that off, but I predict that they’ll get a huge leg-up on their competitors.

In the meantime, if you’re close to news, try to get some video. If it’s good, I’ll host it and save you the bandwidth charges. This stuff is just plain cool, and it’s fun to be part of it. Here’s an earlier post on the subject, too. I’m hoping that Zeyad will shoot some video interviews in Baghdad or Basra, and that we can make them available. Since the Big Media folks won’t cover these things, we’ll just have to do the best we can. And it’s already working out pretty well.

And yes, I’m evangelizing here.