Picked up Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold.    Working in the wireless space, this book is supposedly quickly becoming a cultural literacy requirement for us vendors.

In short, I thought the book was pretty lame.    The core material for the book could have easily and more appropriately been delivered as a paper or perhaps an influential blog entry  ;-)

The thesis is presented in the Introduction:

Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other.  The people who make up smart mobs cooperatre in ways never before possible becuse they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities.

So, basically, using cellphones and the like, we're able to coordinate across distance and community boundaries in a way we've never been able to before.  The amount of time, and the work it takes to pull groups of individuals together both physically and electronically has undergone an order of magnitude reduction.  As a result, the types of interactions possible has undergone qualitative change.

A few examples of this include:

• The famous incident in the Phillipines where nearly 1M protestors were organized primarily via SMS
• The "liberation" of Japanese teenagers from their parents via cellphones
• eBay, Slashdot   (surprisingly, he doesn't mention blogging!)

So the fundamental insight contained here is substantive.   However, the point is very laboriously made.  The majority is of the book is an examination of the effects at the periphery.  

He meanders through other examples of "smart mobs" in action:

• Open Source development projects like Linux and Apache
• SETI on PC's
• USEnet
• eBay and it's Reputation servers

Most of the book reads as a series of trip journals as Rheingold travels through various intellectual and academic breeding grounds to find cutting edge social interaction.   The insights are there but you have to plow through pretty thick narrative & story telling to get there.   And, you can't help but feel that much of this text is there for Rheingold to show off the (impressive) circle of friends that he's accumulated over the years.