Futurist Howard Rheingold speculates in this article on the rise of the smart mob, groups of people who use technology as producers of information rather than just consumers. This is as much about the shift of power – and struggle for control of such – in a knowledge based society as it is about technology, and therefore it makes for fascinating reading.

The Rapture Index is billed thusly: ‘You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end-time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as a prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we’re moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.’ Apparently things aren’t looking too good folks!

The Best SF Gateway offers over 400 free SF short stories for your reading pleasure online. There’s some good stuff here.

AOL2POP is a small, free utility which allows you to collect your AOL mail from any POP3 enabled mail client such as Outlook Express or Eudora. It’s got to be better than using the kludgy AOL client that’s fer sure.

Prodikeys, the computer keyboard that thinks it’s a music keyboard. No, honestly.

You’re out in the middle of nowhere and your PDA batteries die, what do you do? Why whip out your iSun portable solar charger of course. This elegantly designed little doozy will charge up phones, PDAs and other small gadgets (not laptops!) and costs $80.00 or so. It also comes with suckers to stick it to the car window. Not sure how long it takes to charge up a depleted battery though, especially if you happen to live in….ahem….sunny London.

The Earth As Art is an online exhibition of photos of natural scenes rendered artistically. Lovely really! [via bifurcatedrivets]

I can’t be sure, because the site is all in Japanese and stuff, but this looks like a company specializing in a range of USB controlled gadgets. Featured on the page is an electric fan which is controlled by the PC and a Xmas snowstorm, which….er…need I continue?

Oh yes, it was only a matter of time before all and Far Eastern sundry fell onto the iPod bandwagon, and lo here is another. The e.digital Odyssey 1000 is a tad bigger than the Apple product (aren’t they all?) and features 13 hours of play time, a 10GB hard disk and USB 2.0 for super fast music downloading. Any similarities to the iPod are of course purely coincidental, although it does have two unique features – an integral FM…

Creative Labs’ Nomad Muvo is an innovative little MP3 player that doubles up as a solid state USB flash disk drive. The 128MB version is $170.00 and the 64MB version is $130.00, with both providing 12 hours of MP3 playback from a single AAA battery. Neat. [via TwoMobile]

A-wandering. Service resumes next Friday.

The ever fab DPReview is reporting that a new Toshiba storage card dubbed XD Card will soon be replacing SmartMedia cards. The card (in the middle of the piccie above) is smaller and holds about the same amount of data. The original French report is here.

Wired has posted a nice interview with a supposed ex Nigerian 419 fraud merchant. If you don’t know what that is, you obviously haven’t received a fax or email from someone in Nigeria (or Africa) asking for some help moving money out of the country. Lucky you!

The PC Killer site – the place to go when you’ve really, really, had enough of your PC. Funny stuff! [via Madville.com]

So Apple’s iPod has received an upgrade and a price reduction. New larger capacity models (up to 20GB), now works with Windows and not just Apple computers, and includes contacts, calendar, clock and games. Hmm, does this strike anyone else as a lot more of a PDA than a mere MP3 player? Has Apple stumbled onto a Newton replacement by accident?