B.C. Liberal government has cut funding for arts and cultural organizations by 50 percent this fiscal year, and by 92 percent for 2010–11.

Imagine a 92 percent reduction in your company’s income. How would your industry fare if that was implemented across the board?

NEW YORK – Those who say we’ll never see anything like McEnroe-Connors again should have been near Practice Court 4 at the U.S. Open on Friday.

The press conference at Spencer Herbert’s office drew a big, articulate, energetic crowd, and also mass media attention. The next event we know of is a meeting organized by the Alliance for Arts and Culture at the Vancouver Museum, 1pm on Wednesday, September 2.

Ecomonday has evolved not only to recommend people to follow, but also recommending specific web-pages and blogs, as well as recommending eco-businesses.

I suggest you check Max Gladwell’s site to check for the Tweets containing the #ecomonday hashtag.  If you use Tweetdeck or a similar application, you may want to open a search column for the hashtag.

The cash-strapped state of California is holding a massive two-day garage sale to get rid of cars, computers, prison gear and anything else deemed surplus and beef up empty coffers in the process.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came up with the idea of the “Great California Garage Sale” after slashing the government car fleet by 15 per cent. He’s since become the garage sale’s biggest promoter, holding news conferences, discussing it in web chats and Tweeting about it to followers.

VANCOUVER — Forget the Olympics, next year is the 100th anniversary of the Pacific National Exhibition!

The PNE is looking at all sorts of special ways to celebrate its centennial, including the possibility of big-name concerts at a rebuilt Empire Stadium.

Alas, that’s a year off, and the PNE still has to stage this year’s fair. A “penultimate” PNE, if you will, before the Big Do.

The fair opens today and runs to Sept. 7. To get some buzz going, the PNE has expanded its concert lineup and brought in all manner of new attractions. Still, programmers had to strike a balance with the traditional fair fare the masses know and love.

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada–It’s Thursday night, three days before the gates officially open to Burning Man, but already a lot of people have arrived here for set-up. The arts festival is quickly taking shape.

It’s one of the bigger pieces of trash in a sprawling mass of garbage-littered water, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where most of the plastic looks like snowy confetti against the deep blue of the north Pacific Ocean.

SEATTLE — I am here attending the geekfest of geekfests called Gnomedex. Its name is a play on the old tech conference Comdex, which ironically doesn’t exist anymore. Coming here is a throwback to my time as a pure tech journalist going to conferences such as Macworld and the Consumer Electronics Show. But what’s interesting is that even in the geekiest settings, and perhaps especially in the geekiest settings, social media has come to the fore.

he Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, with Senior Sponsorship from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, present FOCAS 2009 August 16-19 on the theme Of the Press: Models for Preserving American Journalism.  The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Journalism is collaborating in this Forum, and will present working models for sustainability of journalism in two contexts which will provide an opportunity to delve into specific ways that enterprise journalism can move forward in the digital age. Check out the agenda then join the conversation live at aspeninstitute.tv, courtesy of GroundReport.com, a global news platform with a hyperlocal perspective.