• The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube - The Observer
  
  "...among its millions of clips is a treasure trove of rare and fascinating arts footage, lovingly posted by fans."

• 61 Reforms to C-61, Day 47: Education Harms - Lessons Include Special Infringement Provision
  
  "Why the government felt it was necessary to create a new liability provision only for lessons is not clear. Infringement is infringement, yet Bill C-61 establishes an entire new class of infringement specifically for lessons."
• If You Want To Create a Mashup, Just Ask Your Browser. Mozilla Labs Launches Ubiquity.
  
  "This is an ambitious project whose goal is to make natural language into a programming interface. It is open-source so anyone can contribute to make it work with more APIs and Web Services."

• Culture cuts deal blow to digitization strategy
  
  "program cuts seemingly guarantee Canada will fall further behind the digitization race, leaving Canadians without online access to their cultural and historical heritage and doing precious little to promote Canadian content to the rest of the world."

Endeavor Has Left the Island, originally uploaded by turbojoe.

I'm not exactly ready to surface just yet, but I just have to send huzzahs over to the standout team at the University of Mary Washington for their revamped instance of UMWBlogs.

What an elegant fusion of form and function. What energy and ease. What an incredible resource for the UMW community on such a moderate investment.

Check out the fantastic user documentation and screencasts, which allows the unit to support a vast user base with minimal effort. (The user friendliness of WordPress helps in that regard.) This is what a sustainable project should aspire to...

Do take some time to read over Jim Groom's backgrounder, and the Mighty Bava is always worth watching for cutting edge applications of WordPress and other grooviness in the neighborhood.

I can only look on in wonder, and with some small degree of envy. The system that UMW DTLT has established is not only a blogging platform, it provides a backbone for all manner of online publishing, course delivery, community building and educational resource sharing. I am astonished that more institutions aren't learning from UMW's example. Those of us following in their wake need to kick things up a notch to make the case.

• The naughts—By Roger D. Hodge (Harper's Magazine)
  
  "not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction."
• Peter Milton - Artist/Printmaker
  
  Some impressive pieces in the "Hidden Cities" series...

Many probosci make light work, originally uploaded by Max xx.

In case you didn't know about it, I wanted to plug the next Sustainable Living Arts School event, the Skills and Arts Weekend in Robert's Creek, August 23 and 24.

These events are always a lot of fun, a good mix of information and activity, and it's a trip to meet permaculturists and learn from them in their home environments. All in all, a fantastic activity to frame a visit to British Columbia's Sunshine Coast.

I'll be attending the Beekeeping session. Given what we know about the importance of bees for pollination and their alarming decline in population, it strikes me as an essential self-preservation skill.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a backlog to attack.

• One Man's Quest to Digitize and Publicize Rare Records
  
  "The copyright situation surrounding some of these songs is as murky as their sound quality."
• Thievery Corporation Takes Aim at Crappy Radio |
  
  "With the suspension of habeas corpus, outsourced torture, illegal wars of aggression, fuel, food, and economic crises, it’s hard to close your eyes and sleep while the world is burning around you."

• The 10 most terrible tyrants of tech
  
  "They've ruled the industry — or they've failed, loudly."
• COSTAR | Committee for Open Software Technology and Applications Research
  
  Interesting looking group at SFU.

• Lexipedia - Where words have meaning
  
  The return of the visual thesaurus...?

• An Education in the Dangers of Online Research
  
  "It's not like we copied and pasted," Gruntz said, "or bought it online."