The Jane Goodall Institute’s new Gombe Chimpanzee Blog posts its entries exclusively to Google Earth. The action takes place in western Tanzania, on the densely forested slopes facing Lake Tanganyika.

Remarkably, over seven months after the launch of Google Earth, this is the first blog I know of to jump in at the deep end in this way. You can certainly make the case that when it comes to blogging a creature as territorial as the chimpanzee, where the action happens is a crucial piece of context. (Via Googlers’ Blogs)

Sauce Ketchup, a French Google Earth sightseeing site.

Google Running Logs: If you have a server, you can install this to display your own personalized routes on your website with Google Maps. It generates KML as well.

Dan Karran does some thinking about how to make the Drupal content management system geo-savvy. His plans include linkage to Google Earth, obvs. (I’d still like to see georeferences embedded in HTML like so.)

Google Earth is about to be run over by monsters, because what was an extreme hack just two weeks ago has now matured into a smooth-as-silk plugin for Alias/Autodesk’s Maya, that $2,000 3D authoring tool so beloved by special effects people.

It’s called Maya 2 Google Earth, a free open source tool by Eyebeam, the people that came up with the original Ogle 3D extraction utility.

In a fit of hope, I downloaded Maya’s free personal learner edition, thinking that it might work with Maya2GE, but alas I was thwarted at the last step, so it remains a toy for those in the business. (As a silver lining, though, this means that the monsters will be of a certain quality:-)

The rest of us can still make our own 3D eyecandy with the KML examples supplied on the Maya2GE site. Here’s a screenshot of a dragon rampaging through Chinatown:

Of course, Maya is good for much more than importing games characters — the immersive world Second Life is founded on Maya, so suddenly these two worlds have gotten a lot closer in terms of showing each other’s content. And exporting from Maya to Google Earth will allow the wholesale replacement of central business districts with more detailed architecture.

Eyebeam’s Theo Watson writes that he’s hoping for volunteers to supply a Godzilla to rampage through Japan. I’m still holding out for a King Kong on the Empire State Building, meanwhile.

[Update 21:22 UTC: Got questions? Head on over to the Maya2GE forum.]

This is mainly of interest to me, Swedish readers, and those of you coming over for a visit: Stockholm Tunnelbana routes for Google Earth, courtesy of Kildor. (While you’re here, check out what’s happening.)

You’ll find other European subways at the Google Earth Community Mapping Experiment, initiated by ink_polaroid a month ago and which has garnered a huge response in the meantime.)

Jeremy Bartley upgrades the functionality of his excellent Mapdex search site. He’s also found a way to increase the coverage of ArcIMS-served overlays, by requesting four adjacent images instead of one. It’s a clever hack (via Spatially Adjusted.)

Scotland’s Sunday Herald shows that those who don’t know their Google Earth history are destined to repeat it.

The Micro GPS tracking module has the exact same feature list as the KML-savvy Trackstick, blogged 2 weeks ago, but costs twice as much, at over $600. FYI.

The Register (of course) finds a 40-meter long profanity in Google Earth.

Google Earth for Mac has quietly been updated to 3.1.0617.0 beta, with a build date of February 9. A quick check of the release notes shows that the minimum configuration is now OS X 10.3.9, which should be good news for many Mac users.

The release notes are a trove of interesting workarounds, and are well worth the read. They will tell you how to get to password-protected content, for example, or how to associate .kml and .kmz files with Google Earth. No native Intel support yet, but the notes state that using Rosetta works fine.

Another new feature is that Microsoft Entourage is now supported as a mail client in the preferences, in addition to Apple Mail. In fact, such support was available before if you used Barry Wainwright’s hack from his Entourage User’s Weblog. Barry now writes it is his hack that made it into the latest Google Earth version, down to the same variable names, and that “It’s nice to be appreciated in this way. It would be nicer to be acknowledged as well.” (I haven’t verified this independently.) [14:20 UTC: The announcement on Google Earth Community mentions Barry’s contribution.]

(Via MacWorld, which continues its Google Earth review with a second installment, though again without focusing on network links, arguably Google Earth’s most interesting feature.)

In the hunt for the new in Google Earth content, here is another one that’s obvious after the fact as soon as you hear it: Google Earth-enhanced golf courses. Daniel Herring and Mickey Mellen are the guys behind golfnation.org:

Me and a friend are putting together a new site with golf course information. We’ve started in Atlanta (USA) and we’re going to slowly spread around to more cities.

There are a lot of sites that have this info, but ours has a twist – Google Earth. :) We’ve taken screenshots for every hole on the site (around 500 so far) and have a downloadable KML for each course that shows the course layout, hole information, and usually a polygon or two for the clubhouse.

They’re asking for suggestions as to how else they could improve coverage using Google Earth. As I don’t have a clue about golf, let me be bold: Sell GPS-enabled golf balls! And get Tiger’s arcing shots into Google Earth — if not live, then as a library of great games. And why not put those upcoming Volkswagen/Google Earth mini consoles in golf carts on a wifi-enabled course, so that you can check out the course as you play, or perhaps even fly along with your ball? Individual players on the course should definitely wear little GPS devices, so that course managers can better coordinate fast and slow players.

I’m guessing 3D virtual globes will need to get to the next generation before golfers can truly benefit, with a much ameliorated 3D mesh for the course, and also “real” trees. Or maybe there is money to be made today from add-on packs? Any suggestions from people who actually play?

(BTW, Mickey Mellen’s other Google Earth brainchildren? Google Earth Hacks and GEWar. And we know how those turned out…)