Huffington Post tech editor Jose Antonio Vargas got a chance to sit down with Al Gore recently, and the conversation covered several topics of particular interest to us here. The former vice president came back again and again to the idea that we're in the midst of a political transition from a one-way television era to a new age of collaborative communications made possible by the Internet. The intersection of medium and politics is something Gore has been interested in ever since he wrote his college thesis on how the visual medium of TV made body language more important than rhetoric, image more powerful than reason. You can imagine that Gore's political career only served to increase his interest in how the perception of politics -- and politicians -- shapes public life.

The interview also covered everything from ComStat to the Internet as a fundamental right to the history of the Interstate Highway System to Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine. Worth a read.

In today's Daily Digest, we rather exhaustively recap Netroots Nation and RightOnline, the blogger conferences held this past week and weekend in Austin, Texas.

Al Gore just announced a new campaign to $300 million climate change campaign. It’s a very slick website called We Can Solve the Climate Crisis, or We for Short.

At the risk of being totally un-PC for We, I have some problems here (and I’m not talking about the shock of seeing the phrase, “Nobel laureate former Vice President Al Gore” — didn’t I just know him as boring Al?).

Data from Compete shows that while Obama's site gets more hits, Clinton's gets more attention; a mayoral candidate in London submits to possibly the first political interview on Twitter; look out for the Wall Tweet Journal's launch in May; California asks citizens to propose solutions to state problems. Are the candidates listening?; Al Gore launches a new campaign -- not for president, but against global warming.

If it were not for the internet, and all the campaign- and voter-generated activism that it has enabled, Hillary Clinton would already be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, and Barack Obama or another reform-minded candidate would be trailing badly. But the old winnowing process, where Big Money and the Bigfoot Media dominated, is being broken by the internet. Witness the rise of Barack Obama...

On any given day, I've got about four or five books that I'm currently reading--or trying to finish--and I can understand why some people try to take a "reading week" (or month) where they do nothing but catch up with the piles of things that we wish we had time to read. I'm taking a break from my own piles to offer some capsule reviews of several books I did manage to read this year that cover the emerging world of technology and politics.

Democracy for America, the organizing network that grew out of the ashes of the Dean campaign, has announced the results of its "Pulse Poll" on the Democratic presidential race. With more than 150,000 votes cast, the winner is Dennis Kucinich, with 49,000. He did not get the 66% required to get DfA's endorsement, however.

Much to his chagrin, Ron Paul is attracting support from online neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups; MoveOn tells Google to allow its name to be used in critical ads; is 2008 the Year of the Gimmick?; Al Gore says he isn't running, but new videos suggest otherwise; more from Katherine Seelye about women and online politics; and new numbers from Nielsen suggest that Hillary Clinton is beginning to dominate online but former king of online fundraising John McCain has zero online buzz/

Ron Paul supporters have put together some amazing charts showing his fundraising progress in real time; Iowans are not really using the web to engage with the campaigns, the New York Times reports; Jose Antonio Vargas is video blogging; Off The Bus organizes 18 citizen journalists to cover the Obama field campaign; and Draft Gore amasses over 200,000 signatures urging Al Gore to run.

Reactions to Thomas Friedman's piece on "Generation Q's" alleged lack of political activism; rumors about an alleged John Edwards affair are being vigorously denied and are failing to take hold in the blogosphere; Al Gore co-won the Nobel Peace Prize, once again raising speculations about a White House bid; a few candidates are experiencing a huge surge in blogosphere chatter; progress on Ron Paul's attempt to raise $12 million by Dec. 31; do blogger endorsements carry more weight that those from newspapers?; updates about the Spartan Internet Political Performance Index; Chris Dodd's can't bring a supporter along to a Red Sox game after all; and Barack Obama's new online-only ad.