Smart Mobs

Smart Mobs Howard Rheingold

peer-to peer ad-hocracy

the screens on the few unoccupied desks in the block-square geek farm seemed to be talking to each other. Animated graphical displays danced in bright colors on dozens of monitors

SETI@home—a collective supercomputer spread all over the Net.

Napster

In mid-1999, SETI@home clients were made available online for free downloading. “It’s been a wild ride since then,” says Anderson. “We were hoping for at least 100,000 people worldwide to get enough computer power to make the thing worthwhile. After a week, we had 200,000 participants, after four or five months it broke through a million, and now it’s past 2 million