According to wordspy.com a smart mob is:

"the leaderless gathering and moving of like-minded people who are organized using technologies such as cell phones, e-mail, and the Web."

The phrase was made popular by Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

In his many descriptions of the phrase, he suggests that the people are not always like-minded. Sometimes they may just have one common goal that they are seeking to achieve and then do so using mobile technology to coordinate their efforts. The people often do not know each other and are linked through their cellular phones that contain both "communication and computing capabilities." These phones are connected with not only other phones, but also with other information devices.

Today there are services that can send news and weather updates from the web directly to a cellular telephone, similar services can send people political and social information if they request it. Several examples of smart mobs can be seen by clicking on the "Examples of Flash Mobs" link on this page., the strategies relied on its participants remaining dispersed until mobile communications requested them to converge on their specific target all at once.

Also all three of these examples of Smart Mobs are examples of non-violent political protests. Other more uses for Smart Mob technology exist as well. Military groups around the world, including the United States, have used "netwar strategy and swarming tactics." The United States and its allies introduced small teams of special forces that were wirelessly linked and able to call in increasingly accurate aircraft and missile strikes in Afghanistan. This is an example of the U.S.'s use of netwar, a term created by two analysts for the RAND Corporation, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt who recognized that the use of technologies and a decentralized organizational structure was quickly becoming an effective force against difficult political situations.

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