BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Tuesday night, a mob of about 65 people marched into the Mall of America in Minneapolis and proceeded to strike robot-like poses in front of a giant plasma screen showing The Lord of the Rings. The participants were summoned via e-mail or text messaging. This event and others like it in New York and San Francisco are testaments to the organizational potential of new communications technology. This sort of spontaneous happening has been dubbed a "flash mob" --part of the "Smart Mob" phenomenon that Howard Rheingold laid out in his prophetic book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and he says it's evolving past performance art to forever alter the way we gather and disseminate information vital to our lives. Howard Rheingold, welcome to On the Media!

HOWARD RHEINGOLD: My pleasure to be here!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the first international moblogging conference happened this month in Tokyo. What does this conference signify for you?

HOWARD RHEINGOLD: Well, it was gratifying for me because I predicted it in the book -- [LAUGHTER] not really a difficult prediction -- that people were going to start sending pictures and commentary about events they witnessed in the world directly to the internet from their telephones, because we now have these picture phones, camera phones -- and in some parts of the world, like Tokyo, you can actually send video to the net. And I think that that's-- a radical new way for new to be disseminated. I think it's one of the many changes that the combination of the internet as a distribution medium and the mobile device as a, a production medium is, is bringing us.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I wonder if you can give me a couple of examples of moblogging in an important news event. Has that happened yet?

HOWARD RHEINGOLD:You know, we have not seen the really seminal news event moblogged yet. We haven't seen something that's really something that you would see on the front pages that comes from someone on the street before it comes from--one of the mass media. But I think one event that was something of a watershed was when the worldwide anti-war demonstrations happened before the U.S. attack on Iraq. The BBC in London had a web site where they invited people all over the world who had camera phones that were equipped to send messages to the internet to send the photographs from the demonstrations. So you could log on to the internet from anywhere in the world that day and see on the BBC site photographs from demonstrations in Stockholm and Berlin and San Francisco -- I think really for the first time in history the people who were participating in the events were the ones who were sending the images that people saw in the world.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:A lot has been said about the democratization of the media through all of these new technologies, but seven or eight years back in interviewed Matt Drudge who told me "Let a million journalists report," and, and let's face it -- he's not an ideal poster child for this sort of unmediated journalism.

HOWARD RHEINGOLD: Matt Drudge is a good example of the fact that democratization does not necessarily equal higher quality. Yes, we will see a million journalists bloom, and many of them are going to be sensational or wrong. Some of them are going to be as good as anything you're going to see, and I think eventually will be winning those Pulitzer Prizes. Dan Gilmor at the San Jose Mercury, the, the paper of record for the Silicon Valley, has a weblog that is very high quality. Over time, reputations, I think are go--are going to distinguish the people who use good journalistic techniques from those who are merely sensational reporters.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So your book is called Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Is it still next or has it arrived?

HOWARD RHEINGOLD:The, the Smart Mob revolution is really just beginning. I think if you remember what happened with personal computers and with the internet, that will give you an idea of where we are now. In the early 1980s, the personal computer came along, and a lot of people asked "What the heck are we going to do with these things?!" We now know what you can do with these things. I think we're about at the same point with smart mobs now. The combination of the mobile telephone, the internet and the personal computer is making a new medium possible. We're seeing Philippine citizens peacefully overthrowing a government; they organized that through text messaging and tho-- that was not the elite. The mobile telephone in the Philippines was the poor person's internet. We are seeing the Howard Dean campaign using self-organization. We're seeing these flash crowds doing kind of performance art on the street. These are really just the first manifestations. Where it's going to lead, I think is going to be very much more powerful than either the PC or the internet, because we're talking about people mobilizing collective action, and mobilizing collective action's what civilization has been about.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the revolution this time will be televised.

HOWARD RHEINGOLD: It will be webcast.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Howard Rheingold, thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

HOWARD RHEINGOLD: My pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Howard Rheingold joined me from his home outside San Francisco. His book is Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and his web site is Rheingold.com. We're joined now by the blogger and professional journalist he mentioned, Dan Gilmor. Gilmor is making a study of the relationship between professional journalists and those who are driven through conviction or mischief or whatever to report from their PC's and cell phone cameras to the world. He says their efforts are already seeping into the mainstream and that some day their work will be part of all of our media diets. Dan, welcome to the show!

DAN GILMOR: Glad to be with you!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you are a technology columnist for the Mercury News as well as a blogger. You're also a proponent of what I guess you've termed "We Journalism." How do you define that?

DAN GILMOR: Well I define it in basically one way which is the notion that my readers know more than I do, and I'd like to capture that knowledge in the best sense of the word for our mutual advantage. I like to have them as part of a conversation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:And not just a casual conversation, I guess, because you're working on a book called Making the News. You have the outline on the web. It's fascinating by the way. You're asking readers to participate in every single chapter! Tell me what Making the News is about.

DAN GILMOR: It's about this intersection of journalism and technology and what happens to journalism in the largest sense of the word as a result. You have I think three constituencies -- one being of course the journalists. But you also have the people we call "newsmakers" - the people and institutions we write about - and then finally you have what I've been calling the former audience -- and I say former because I think they're now part of the process if they want to be.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I wonder if you wouldn't mind speculating about the great opportunity that web journalists have ahead of them in the upcoming election!

DAN GILMOR: I'm intrigued beyond belief at what Howard Dean is doing with the web. I think there's a breakthrough going on there, but I have to do a lot more reporting before I'm sure I understand exactly what it is. But they have this fundamental belief in the Dean campaign that the decentralized nature of the internet is going to work for them in a very big way, and I think that we're going to see journalists popping up, following individual campaigns or individual subjects, and they may be total amateur webloggers or professionals but who want to drill in, in some niche part of the process and bring us more than we ever wanted to know [LAUGHS] in some cases about some angle on the thing. I think that's where the real value of weblogs shows up, and I hope we see a lot of that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:With regard to the many, many bloggers who may be covering the election, there is an interesting chapter title in the book that you put on line or the outline called "Can We Believe Any of This?"

DAN GILMOR: [LAUGHS] Well the answer is yes, we can believe some of it. One of the things webloggers do is kind of fact-check each other. Ken Lane who's a wonderful weblogger and, and newspaper guy wrote "We can fact-check your ass." [LAUGHTER] I thought that was a great line, and it was very true, and it's important that people correct the things they get wrong, but if they don't, they lose credibility among the people who will otherwise point at them. We, we do need to re-calibrate at some level our sense of skepticism, because any web page can look at good as any other web page, and look at authoritative. The audience is going to have to actually start thinking a little bit the way reporters think, which is to remember that just because they saw it somewhere doesn't mean it's true!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you very much.

DAN GILMOR: Glad to be with you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Journalist, author and blogger Dan Gilmor's web site can be found at SiliconValley.com. He spoke to us from Stanford University. [MUSIC]