Gombe Chimp blog revamps with help from Earthwatchr

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Two related announcements of note: 1) The pioneering and Google Earth-featured Gombe Chimp Blog gets a major upgrade (including a design revamp and a change of address), and now uses 2) Earthwatchr, a new open-source geosavvy content management backend that uses Google Maps to georeference posts and which outputs content both as HTML with ready-made Google Maps and as KML.

Earthwatchr beta source code will be available July 15, 2007, according to the site. Bryce Tugwell and Nick Novitski are the people behind this. Nick blogs his involvement in the development of Earthwatchr on That Bright Instrument, highlighting some of the cool features:

If you go to the [Gombe Chimp Blog], you can see Earthwatchr integrates google maps, google earth, and your website into a single experience. Please feel free to try out the geo-referenced comment feature: Replies and comments that possess spatial information, just like the posts themselves

Bryce let me have a look at the CMS: Here’s how you georeference the post — you can even add a path:

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There are also options for defining the view in Google Earth. Here’s some of them:

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Earthwatchr is written in ASP, but Bryce writes in an email:

We will be posting a forum for users to post questions suggestions and new versions, perhaps some other users will decide to jump in and start a PHP version.

There are a couple of other geosavvy CMSes out there, but Earthwatchr is the only one I am aware of that uses Google Maps in the back-end to georeference posts. I’m guessing most mainstream blog CMSes will have this feature in a couple of years. What I’m also looking forward to is GeoRSS support.

8 thoughts on “Gombe Chimp blog revamps with help from Earthwatchr”

  1. Great news! I have been watching and looking for a good GeoCMS that integrates a blog with Google Maps/Earth. This looks great and look forward to seeing it in a month or so. Thanks for this early notice and report.

    It sounds like EarthWatchr is a stand alone system but wonder if it could be easily integrated into WordPress or MoveableType?

    Cheers,

    Keene

  2. Keene,

    We would like to publish a similar tool as a plugin for wordpress. We will be starting a forum on earthwatchr.org in the next week or so and start collecting ideas – and resources to start working in that direction.

    I hope you join us.

    -Bryce

  3. Just a note on he WP plugin front, checkout GeoPress, that uses Google Maps (and other providers via mapstraction) to Geocode posts so your RSS can be GeoRSS. There is also an extension to output KML (inc network links) – if it still isn’t in the default install see my blog.

  4. The EarthWatchr content management system creates the posts in a variety of XML formats – and is flexible enough to quickly add others. The hard part has been integrating all three formats into a viewing experience that is as seamless as possible. We have had to make some compromises, to allow for our content to run on the website, in Google Maps, and in Google Earth the way that we have. Dealing with special characters in the XML (Even inside the CDATA tags) so that the Maps application runs on the major browsers has been a royal headache. My biggest concern in developing a plugin application that does everything the current package does lies in dealing with these characters within WordPress. But we sure would like to see it happen.

  5. The EarthWatchr content management system creates the posts in a variety of XML formats – and is flexible enough to quickly add others. The hard part has been integrating all three formats into a viewing experience that is as seamless as possible. We have had to make some compromises, to allow for our content to run on the website, in Google Maps, and in Google Earth the way that we have. Dealing with special characters in the XML (Even inside the CDATA tags) so that the Maps application runs on the major browsers has been a royal headache. My biggest concern in developing a plugin application that does everything the current package does lies in dealing with these characters within WordPress. But we sure would like to see it happen.

  6. Thanks for this info. I have played around with GeoPress and it is a very nice plug-in for WordPress. So, I am curious how EarthWatchr will be different. The commenting feature is nice on the Goodall blog. Not sure if you all have seen WP plug-ins WikiMap, Geo Mashup and GoogleMapper. All flavors of geoblogging to some extent for WP. But I think EarthWatchr may be the one to watch. Can’t wait to see it and kudos for all your development work. Who would have know that the lowly special character would be such as headache!

    Keene

  7. These guys should definitely be talking to the folks at Auttomatic (WordPress).

    This has to be one of the most incredible applications I’ve ever seen for publishing!!

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