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.

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.

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.

Nobel speculation heats talk of Gore bid; Facebook Political Summit Tuesday to face criticism?; Slatecard, GOP answer to ActBlue, launches; Evangelicals going progressive?; Michael Cornfield sums up the online field; Obama spokesman goes bottom-up; Rudy makes a fundraising boo-boo; and Meghan McCain goes-a-blogging.

The Web on the Candidates

Is Al Gore running? Leonardo DiCaprio couldn't get it out of it him, but after he won an Oscar for best documentary last night people are talking. Patrick Ruffini noticed that Gore's web site has a new splash page asking visitors to send their names and email addresses to Congress; Ruffini wonders if it's a sign of bigger ambitions. "A good e-mail list is something any candidate needs to hit the ground running. And if you’re smart, you capitalize on high-impact events like the Oscar win to collect e-mail addresses."

In a profile of Students for Barack Obama leaders, the Merced Sun-Star looks for ways that campaigns can use social networking sites like Facebook to get people elected. Meredith Segal, executive director of the group, knows it's about more than online organizing. "We recognize that we have tens of thousands of members online. But unless we get those people out knocking on doors, participating in phone banks, registering voters and obviously ultimately voting, (our) online organizing will be little more than a powerful way to demonstrate support for (Obama)."

John Edwards decided not to fire bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen for things they wrote before he hired them, receiving acclaim from the left and the right, respectively. "This is all being made up as we go along," said Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network in the Times' wrap-up, which compared the Edwards bloggers' statements to inflammatory statements made by Patrick J. Hynes, the conservative blogger hired by John McCain.

Glenn Greenwald claims success at getting the "MSM" to balance the story: "[the blogosphere] forced into the public discussion critical facts that were being omitted and which exposed the absurdity of this story, thereby providing a counterweight to the joint right-wing/media pressure on Edwards to capitulate to these forces." John Palfrey calls the attacks on Edwards' bloggers "an extension of classic opposition research. It points to some of the risks at having people blog on behalf of a campaign in an official capacity." Phil Noble adds, "we have a new technology that's disrupting the whole political process, and we haven't figured out what the rules are."