Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs

smartmobs.com is the Website which accompanies Rheingold's 2002 book Smart Mobs: the next social revolution. It's a blog, among other things; it's also the tip of an interesting iceberg of extensions of paper publishing, and an interesting sort of emergent anthropology.
Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.
(from the summary page for the book)
The blog format has many interesting possibilities, epitomised by the link to blog postings on the content of specific chapters --see postings for 'Shibuya Epiphany' (chapter 1).
example: Mie 's cellphone can tag each photo she takes with the latitude/longitude coordinates --see blog entry

These searches of the site may provide grist for the class, if I can define the QUESTIONS appropriately:

'korea' at smartmobs.com

'japan' at smartmobs.com

'china' at smartmobs.com

Looking around for other possibly-useful blogs, I happened upon this page from gweilodiaries.com (main site here