Rare as it is for a country artist to successfully crossover to pop or rock, it’s even rarer for a politician to go from elected office to Hollywood (although the reverse path is well paved).

Now, with Al Gore on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, the former VP’s star is about as high in the sky as it has ever been. Think about it. Only dweebs know the Vice President’s name, but everyone knows a movie star’s name.

Gore told EW, ”I was skeptical about the movie at first. I couldn’t understand what these Hollywood producers were thinking. I didn’t see how the slide show could be a movie. But, you know, they were right. Almost 2 million people have seen An Inconvenient Truth in theaters. That’s 2 million people whose minds may be changed by the film. That’s not something you can do with a slide show.”

The Tennessee gentleman is predictably low key about the impact of his well rendered Power Point presentation. But making an important argument in a captivating way is no small fete feat.

c|net News.com asks which technology has had the most impact in the last 25 years? The cell phone, according to well-known IBM software developer and blogger Sam Ruby.

“It’s killing the landline; it’s killing watches; it’s changing the camera business; it’s changing the TV industry, the music industry,” Ruby said Monday. “It’s destroying the pay-phone industry. It’s hurting the hotel industry and putting the squeeze on universities,” he said during a talk titled “Teenagers on the Go.”

In the future, he said, cell phones will become even more important as gadgets for navigation, search and entertainment. Imagine MapQuest or Google in your ear, Ruby said, referring to people with cell phone earbuds. People could use voice commands to ask for directions, check gas prices or find deals at the grocery store.

Ruby made other projections about the future of the Web. For example, he said, the Web has replaced the desktop in some ways, but now the Web itself is in danger. Why? Ruby believes that based on usage by younger generations, instant messaging will usurp the Web and the phone as the dominant mode of communication.

Speaking of category killers, Random Culture has an interesting take on the new Skype Wi-Fi phone.

Can you envision a future where there are no mobile providers anymore? Where wifi is publicly available and free, and you can make calls over the web instead of cellular networks? You should try.

Fusing the love of a historical art form with the cutting edge modern aesthetics of Italian fashion houses and style-trends, Giampietro Filippetti creates stunning glass mosaic panels. Residing in Milan for more than a decade, Filippetti studied the masterful mosaics of Friuli, Ravenna, Rome and Venice.

“Tunnel” available from Octavia’s Haze in San Franciso

Arriving in Canada in 2003, Filippetti discovered the perfect media with which to bring his artistic visions to life–the remarkable cache of artistic glass available in America, which is very different from the more traditional Smalti glass of Italy.

In February of 2005, and after two years in the making, Filippetti had the opportunity to display his artistic glass panels for the first time in North America. Since its initial introduction, the Filippetti mosaics have been pursued and purchased by collectors and buyers throughout North America.

[Source: Art Business News]

According to USA Today, Marriott is the latest hotel chain to impose a smoking ban.

The move, which affects more than 2,300 lodgings and nearly 400,000 guest rooms, is the hotel industry’s biggest push toward smoke-free properties.

It follows Westin’s move in January to ban smoking throughout 77 U.S., Canadian and Caribbean lodgings, and Disneyland Resort’s decision in March to ban it in all 2,224 rooms in Anaheim, Calif.

If evidence of smoke in one’s room is found at a Marriott or Westin, a $200 levy is assessed. While there’s no surprise here, there might be an opportunity for other hospitality companies to make smokers feel welcome.

While there are no more shows on TV that the majority of Americans watch religiously, there is one show that anyone with a heightened sense of design makes time for.

Project Runway’s third season began last night on Bravo. The cable show is so popular, NBC will be carrying reruns on Monday at 8:00 pm.

While the drama typically centers around competition, I think it’s pretty clear one need not win the whole shebang to further one’s fashion career. In fact, a quick glance at Blogging Project Runway’s sidebar delivers the websites for several of this season’s participants.

One participant who got my attention is Angela Keslar. She lives off-the-grid on a 225 acre farm in southeast Ohio—not exactly an address associated with cutting edge fashion. Her patchwork pants (shown above) go for $225, and can be purchased from her site. So, if you’d like to step it up at Bonnaroo next year, start saving your coins.

The Show with Ze Frank is a quirky little corner of interweb land. It’s a daily video blog, or vlog, much like Rocketboom. But the sell here is not sexy intelligence, it’s zaniness.

Ze Frank’s “frenetic exercise in freestyle news commentary, political snarl, and raggedly personal hilarity” is more suitable to an HBO special than to Comedy Central.

Ze Frank is also good with contests. His contest de jour will reward the person with the ugliest MySpace page, which is at once a brilliant dig, and a great promo.

While old school scratchers like Mix Master Mike might be appalled, there’s a new kind of kid on the DJ block. According to Wired, they’re known as Livecoders and they “improvise using Perl or homemade programming architectures to build compositions from the ground up, replacing instruments and samples with raw code authoring before a live audience.”

Alex Maclean, a U.K. livecoder and art student, said he traded in his guitar when he found he could be more creative with code than with strings. He touch-types using Perl at raves and dance clubs, creating a unique visual and musical experience. Sessions with drummers, MCs and other livecoders can be reminiscent of traditional free-jazz improvisation.

“By describing a musical idea in code, we’re describing it at a higher level than if we’re entering notes into a sequencer,” Maclean said. “I’ve tried sequencers and found it a slow, difficult, maddening way of doing music. Livecoding places the human right back in the creative process so you can’t really call it ‘computer-generated’ any more. If we don’t see programming music software as musical activity, we’re missing an opportunity.”