In the land of startups, when the big guy starts adding features that your service has, there is a mixture of both pride and fear.
- Pride because, clearly, we must be on to something!
- Fear because, oh my gawd, with all those resources, they're going to cream us!
Fear might have been holding us back a little bit but we finally got time to play with Google Blogger's new geolocation test feature.
While you always need to keep an eye on those Google rascals, we didn't have that much to be afraid of -- the new feature is a simple addition to their editor that basically integrates with Google Maps to produce a geolocation for your blog post. Same thing we've been doing with Neighborlogs from the beginning. It doesn't seem to mark Google as suddenly setting its focus on the placeblogging news and info market. As a 20% project developed in a GOOG employee's free time, it seems, instead, another in the long line of small bets Google diligently adds to the table.
When Blogger adds multiple contributor functionality including revenue sharing, integrated ad system designed for small local businesses, usage-driven content presentations, provides a monetization core that isn't tilted heavily in favor of large scale, arbitrage-style remnant advertisers and does it all with a focus and dedication to neighborhood news and information sites -- then, we'll have something to be afraid of.
