New Gombe Chimpanzee Blog Launches

I am very pleased to report that the new Gombe Chimpanzee Blog launched successfully on Friday. I have been working on the concept behind the new blog for about 6 months, and over the last 5 weeks or so I was able to get all the resources and talent in place to make the concept a reality. The new blog is the newest incarnation of an idea I have been working with for the last couple of years: Conservation geoblogging.

The introduction of technologies like Google Earth, Google Maps, and all the other global mapping tools have introduced to the world new and unprecedented ways of seeing our planet and are leading to a rethinking of the way we interact with our world. The impact that these new technologies are going to have on our lives, and how we interact with the space around us is only just beginning to be conceived.

The concept behind conservation geoblogging is a simple one - give the people and organizations who care about our planet a tool to document it, a voice to tell it's stories, and the interconnectivity to make action a possibility. There are a multitude of ways that conservation organizations have used these tools, but the tools have historically been only available to well funded engineers, scientists and researchers. Using these tools for outreach and education has been prohibitively expensive, and limited by software that technically difficult to use.

The Amazon Basin: Vast deforestation threatens to destroy some of the most environmentally rich places on earth

A destroyed village in the Darfur region of Sudan: One of thousands now being documented by Google Earth and Amnesty International in two separate geologging environments.

The new version of the Gombe Chimpazee Blog takes advantage of new, cheap and widely available technologies to make telling these stories to a vast audience possible at a fraction of the cost. Behind the scenes of the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog is EarthWatchr, server software we have developed at the Jane Goodall Institute to make conservation geoblogging available to anyone.

EarthWatchr incorporates standard blogging tools with Google Maps and Google Earth with a simple content management system to create a rich geo-referenced blogging tool that will be useful to conservation organizations as well as individuals interested in creating geoblogs of their own. A beta version of the software is set to be released in July at http://www.earthwatchr.org/ under the Jane Goodall Institutes's new EarthWatchr program.

At the heart of the Earthwatchr project is the hope that by distributing easy to use geoblogging software, both individuals and organizations can use these new mapping tools to document the world around them. Weather the tool is used for tracking a long distance hike or for documenting the impact of logging on local communities, tracking a family of chimpanzees, or documenting bird sightings, the effect will be same. A picture tells a thousand words, and geoblogging tools help bring readers, donors and actors to the story on the ground in a way that is both powerful and entirely new.

I want to give special thanks to Nick Novitski, who worked very hard on this project with me. He was integral in developing the Google Maps integration for both the blog, and the content management system, and deserves kudos for both his excellent work on the project as well as his persistence in working out some of the more difficult details that make the blogging tool easy to use. Nick came to the Institute to work on this project and really took the idea of the blog and made it his own. His inquisitiveness and sharp mind has helped take this project to the next level. I look forward to working with him on the future of the EarthWatchr Project.

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.