Martin Belam writes one of those blogs I read so religiously I almost never bother to pass on what is actually written. Let me make up for it.

Here is Martin addressing Ed Roussel‘s piece on the Guardian PDA blog (itself a kind of Christmas footie match given the Comment is Free/My Telegraph trench warfare):

I’ve watched time and time again in usability labs that for a lot of users “Everything starts with Google“.

Well, when Google add street-views to their UK mapping product, and you access it directly from Google search, that will be the death knell for Multimap and Streetmap in the UK. When Google add more information directly from a look-up of a postcode via search, that will be the death knell for Upmystreet and similar British services.

Google News already does a search ‘by location’ option in their advanced search, and once they start offering that as a personalisation option on Google News, that will be yet another nail in the coffin for local newspapers and news services.

Never mind whether the BBC will produce ‘ultra-local’ news hubs, it is Google’s infinite budget, spotless brand, and seemingly completely free hand in the UK market that poses a bigger commercial threat to all of the UK’s web industry.