I was walking along Auckland's Ponsonby Road midday Thursday when an SUV, queued in traffic, caught fire just a few metres up ahead. Like most onlookers, I immediately scurried about 100m back.

But soon people's cellphones started to appear, and the crowd started edging forward to catch better pics or video. I stopped a semi-stupid 50 metres away (see the crummy 320x320 video from my cellphone below). But a dozen others got as far as the curb immediately adjacent to the vehicle burning in the middle of the road.

In this case, the efforts of these citizen journalists were for naught, as a OneNews car happened to be in the traffic immediately behind the SUV.

But with TV news organisations now openly soliciting viewers' videos - and many sites introducing citizen journalist channels (such as the one recently previewed on YouTube's house blog) - I wonder if, at some point, DIY wannabees are going to start bugging emergency crews.

On a geeky side-note, it took me a little while to get my video online because my cellphone captures pictures in .3GP format, unknown to PCs. I found a good, free utility called Free 3GP Video Converter, which quickly and easily converted my clip above into a Windows-friendly AVI.

It was on a site called DVDVideoSoft, which offers a welter of free tools for converting proprietary video cellphone formats to common PC video formats, and for converting the likes of YouTube videos into cellphone-friendly formats.