Got back a little while ago from an event sponsored by HSBC Bank at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, where about 100 of us got to see Al Gore’s remarkable presentation about global warming. (That’s a file photo above.)

I got to shake hands with the former vice president and introduce myself, but the first thing I asked was whether I could videotape his presentation. He said no, “but a DVD is in the works.”

For those who haven’t heard, “An Inconvenient Truth” is the name of a new movie appearing in select theaters May 24. See the ClimateCrisis.net website. Participant Productions will be working on this campaign as well as part of a broader coalition.

Some quick takeaways:

• Yes, the presentation is as powerful as has been rumored.

• Yes, the changes in weather patterns that we all sense does seem to be real, and more scientists are now leaning in the direction that last year’s record hurricane season is related to global warming — in both number and intensity — with more on the way.

• The most alarming part of this is the rate at which the polar ice caps are melting. Gore showed computer animations in which a modest rise in ocean levels would devastate major cities, causing dislocation for tens of millions of people in China and India and flooding lower Manhattan and most of South Florida.

There was a Q&A following the slide show, and I asked the final question. What should we, as citizens, be doing about this? Only 2 percent of the public believes that global warming is a serious problem. But this isn’t a liberal or conservative issue, it’s an issue that cuts across ideological lines. (Who, besides the coal and oil industries, can possibly argue in favor of melting ice caps?) What, Mr. Vice President, can we do to take action and create a new political movement to make the public aware of the consequences of doing nothing?

Gore has been asked this before, but he was eloquent in his response, touching on our civic responsibilities, on the fact that “this is a moral, an ethical, a spiritual issue,” and one that is the most serious ever faced by humankind. But then he turned to Chinese culture and the Chinese symbol for crisis, a symbol that epitomizes tragedy on one side but opportunity on the other. Combating global warming will be a boon to businesses and entrepreneurs. We will prevail, he said, because we must.

He received a standing ovation.

See previous coverage of Gore’s global warming campaign here.

By the way, I’ll be offline and not blogging for about two weeks — as of now — while vacationing in Italy and traveling to Cannes.

Next week I’ll be staying at Lake Como in northern Italy for a couple of days with Deirdré Straughan, a videoblogger as well as Director of Customer Experience for TVBlob.

They’re onto something pretty cool and just announced a beta program that I thought would be worth sharing, especially with my friends in Italy:

We are about to launch a service that will be the first of its kind in the world! In short, this service enables people to video communicate through televisions when they connect our powerful set-top box to a broadband network. Just imagine…you will be able to turn on your television and make video calls to your family, friends, or colleagues, and even “make your own TV”, be for it for live birthday parties, community events, or business meetings. The quality will be just as good as watching TV, and the convenience will be just as easy as using a TV remote control.

We are seeking people to participate in our first public beta test, scheduled roughly from late May to late June. Of course, we will provide our set-top box to you for free during the testing period, but before you say “yes”, there are a few requirements in order to qualify.

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Last June, Oh Yeon Ho, founder and CEO of the pioneering South Korean online news publication OhmyNews, welcomed a global gathering of citizens media representatives to Seoul.

This July 12-15, OhmyNews is doing it again, with a kicker: They’re paying for round-trip air fare and deluxe hotel accommodations for three representatives from Ourmedia. (I’ll be attending, plus two others.)

If you’ve done some citizen journalism for Ourmedia and want to attend, drop me an email. (I may not get back to you right away; i’ll be on the road to Italy and Cannes starting mid-week this week.)

Mr. Oh writes: “The door is wide open again this year to new media practitioners and citizen reporters around the world. Building upon the success we saw last year, we are aiming to invite the who ‘s who of citizen journalism to Seoul and identify the best practices forward in this still-fledgling field.”

Sounds exciting. Between the OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters’ Forum, the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit and BlogHer, July is gonna be just crazy.

At RealPeopleNetwork.com I have three short video interviews I conducted during OnHollywood this past week:

Steven Starr, CEO of Revver

Tom Green, Hollywood actor

Valerie Cunningham, OnHollywood organizer

Here are two dozen photos I shot at OnHollywood this week in a Flickr set. (That’s Tom Green, top, and Colette Vogele.)

And here’s a 6-minute video interview I conducted with actor Tom Green: MPEG-4 | H.264 for QT7.

Tony Perkins made two surprise announcements at the conclusion of OnHollywood: the conference will return for a second year next year; and AlwaysOn will be sponsoring another conference, OnMedia, in New York in early December, geared toward marketing and business professionals.

Spent a couple of hours this afternoon at the rally for immigrants’ rights in San Francisco, across the street from City Hall. Thousands of people turned out to bask in the sun, dance, hobnob and, oh yeah, listen to political speeches.

Caught some nice images in this Flickr photo set, including actor Danny Glover before he addressed the crowd.

Josh Wolf made a good point I hadn’t thought of before: “This is a prime example of ‘Citizen Journalism’ doesn’t work as a term. There probably will be many of them out there who actually aren’t citizens on Monday. And why is it exactly that Independent Journalist isn’t considered appropriate?”

Also, at Real People Network there’s a quick video I did at the protest rally.

Technorati tags: rally, immigration, celebrity, Danny Glover, protest, video, Canon Rebel XT, citizen journalism, We media