New digital tools and distributed media systems are changing human reality. The noosphere emerges from the biosphere, heralding quantum shifts in communication, education, entertainment and commerce. Selective reporting on relevant products, events and resources here.

This week:

Movin' MP3s
MP3 is a kind of protest movement against record companies, which many artists hate because they control access to the music market. MP3 enables them to bypass the gatekeepers. One website has signed up more than 10,000 bands which use the service to distribute or promote their works.

Vive la Vinyl?
Who ever thought you could actually DJ MP3s? Check out this Wired Report on the "Final Scratch" technology that will enable you to mix & scratch your favorite digital file.

Killer Gaming
Lately a few bestselling games have challenged tradition by encouraging players to engage brain before trigger-finger. What makes these "stealth" games special is that they reward silence and concealment rather than a disgustingly high kill-rate.

Geek Nostlgia
What Was Your First Computer? Apple, Atari, Commodore, or Radio Shack? In the bedrooms, the arcades, and the high school computer rooms of the 1980s, kids of the Atari generation invented today's digital culture. An excerpt from the forthcoming memoir, Extra Life, by David S. Bennahum for The Atlantic Unbound

Sick of Monoculture
"The relentless spread of a single platform pushes out and finally kills its ecological competition - in turn creating the very monocultures that leave the software vulnerable to subversion." Whether you're talking forestry or cubicle, monoculture endangers the environment. By Jamais Cascio for Salon in "The Ecology of Computer Viruses"

Photography in the Age of Falsification
The wildlife photography we see in films, books, and periodicals is often stunning in its design, import, and aesthetics. It may also be fake, enhanced, or manufactured by emerging digital technologies that have transformed -- some say contaminated -- the photography landscape by Kenneth Brower for The Atlantic Unbound