Algore
There came a point during Saturday's Live Earth webcast, otherwise known as the global effort to canonize Al Gore, when you almost expected the man to levitate off the stage and, in all his tofu-pallored glory, transubstantiate into a higher being. Maybe Bono.

Such was his saintly presence: On the stage at Giant Stadium in New York. On 30-foot tall screens in Brazil, Japan, and Australia. On the penitent lips of Madonna, Metallica, and Shakira. And, wait, are those his hands on the posters and title cards, cradling the globe? So unflagging is Gore in his devotion to climate change, and so ubiquitous on every continent's stage, that you begin to suspect the man himself runs on biodiesel, or at least slicks his hair with it.

And let's talk about biodiesel for a sec. The inescapable paradox of Live Earth is its mixed messaging. The MSN webcast's main sponsor is Chevy. The concert stages, no matter how carbon neutral, are power-sucking sound machines. The rock bands are jetsetting globo-tourists (a fact to which Duran Duran alluded during their set in London). And we all watched in our air-conditioned homes, with our brightly-lit LCD screens, as the world was pumped in through the middle class medium of broadband. Sigh. How conveniently we rage.

The rejoinder: At least the Web experience was more engaging, and thus offered more opportunities to act, than the Bravo television broadcast. The Bravo show skipped from big name act to big name act while relying on Dave Holmes and Karen Duffy -- Who? What? Shut up. -- to comment blandly on what you just saw. The effect was not unlike being a passenger in your grandmother's car. Go faster, turn here, oh hell forget it, I'll drive.

Bravo may have learned from MTV's bungling of Live 8 in 2005 (talk less, play music more), but only just. Bravo's only benefit: By watching both the Web and the time-shifted TV programming it was possible to achieve a media parallax in which Alicia Keys preceded Ludacris preceded Alicia Keys. Instant replay!

It's not hard to see where this is going. Reuters reported Sunday that the concerts were streamed 9 million times, almost double Live 8's day-after streams two years ago. The majority of the streams will come in the following weeks, with the number expected to climb to nearly 300 million. And then: More shows, more events, more everything online.

Live Earth is broadband's biggest event to date. And Al Gore, patron saint and band leader of climatology, its biggest star.