The Future of the Internet The Gombe Chimpanzee Blog is Featured in the Economist's The World in 2007 Interview with Eric Schmidt

I started working on the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog (requires Google Earth) in November of 2005. I started playing with the Google Earth API after reading a really striking article in Technology Review on Google Earth, and Microsoft's Virtual Earth (which hadn't been released yet), and knew right away that there were exciting possibilities presented by this relatively new software.

A year and a half later and I am excited to say that the ideas behind the blog have really blossomed. The Google Earth/blog mash-up has gotten a fair amount of Internet coverage over the last year, and last month was cited as an example in an interview with Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt for an article in The Economist magazine's The World in 2007 on the future of the Internet.

The thing that set the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog (GCB) apart from the many other geo-referenced blogs is that rather than just geotagging (place marking) blog content, the the GCB dedicates all blog content to the Google Earth format. This format requires readers to download Google Earth to read the blog, a decision that I felt was important but was not terribly popular when the blog was first published. Both at the Institute, and in the eyes of some who wrote about the blog at the time of its release, the decision to have the blog run its content exclusively in the Google Earth format was criticized. The format at first seemed unwieldy and downloading software asked too much of the reader; ultimately however it was to be what set us apart, and the reason the blog became so successful.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail

I argued that as a developer, both embracing and simultaneously transcending the preconceptions of the format of Google Earth (or Microsoft's Virtual earth, Yahoo's maps etc..) is the key to what lies behind the future of this new medium, and what made the GCB exciting. "I describe it as a browser for the earth," John Hanke, general manager of Google's Keyhole group, says of Google Earth, and this is the key leap that isn't being made with applications that rely solely on "place marking" from traditional web browsers alone. Ultimately these new "earth" browsers are interesting because they promise a means of wedding the web with real space, enhancing physical places with information that can deepen our experiences of them and make computing into a more transparent and "continuous" part of our real lives. How this information is rendered "inside" these new browsers is where the interesting challenge for designers, artists and developers lies.

Ultimately, the GCB was celebrated for providing content in a new way, rather than damned for alienating users of traditional tool sets. An important set of ideas to come to terms with when approaching a new technology like Google Earth, is that someone else's attention, intention, and assumption about how a tool will be used is built into that instrument. Abraham Maslow a twentieth century American psychologist commented on technology, saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail. Overcoming this barrier in thinking is imperative to understanding the broader potential impact of a new instrument. It is the artist's responsibility, if not fate, to pick up a tool and use it in a completely novel way.