A good friend (you know who you are) passed along a great article in the Washington Post on the power of swarms, or mobs - when armed with mobile terminals. Here it is. An exceerpt:

Smart mobs are a serious realignment of human affairs, in which leaders may determine an overall goal, but the actual execution is created on the fly by participants at the lowest possible level who are constantly innovating, Rheingold notes. They respond to changing situations without requesting or needing permission. In some cases, even the goal is determined collaboratively and non-hierarchically. It is the warp-speed embodiment of Gandhi's maxim, "There go my people, I must run to catch up with them for I am their leader."

The key to the power of mobiles -- including hybrids like two-way pagers, Blackberry e-mailers, personal digital assistants merged with phones, wireless laptops, and phones merged with two-way radios -- is that they liberate people from their desktop telephones and computers, moving the action out to that much larger portion of life that encompasses wherever and whenever humans roam. "My friends call me on my cell even when I'm at home," says one teenager who is a child of divorce, "because they don't know whether I'm at my mom's house or my dad's."

This is the power of the internet squared - the real power - the mobile internet. It's not just a joke, it's destiny.