“Today we’re releasing a new feature to find your local news by simply typing in a city name or zip code,” Google software engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna wrote in a post to the official company blog. “While we’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, we’re doing it a bit differently–we’re able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.”

Location-based news targeting. Pretty slick. Or it will be, once they get the 90210 bug worked out. Still, as Topix co-founder Rich Skrenta notes, Google’s a little late to this particular game. “This was pretty neat stuff when Topix launched in January 2004,” Skrenta quips. “Now if Google just added 50,000 vetted local blogs to the mix, and a community with 100K posts/day, they’ll have something.”

“We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question,” Google software engineers Dan Meredith and Andy Golding explained in a blog post. “Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we’ll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as ‘comments’ so readers know it’s the individual’s perspective, rather than part of a journalist’s report.” You know, just like Topix. Passive news, active dialogue.

Google says it will vet comments by confirming the identity of their authors–which it must, if it’s truly serious about this initiative. But is that even possible? Comments@google.com is certain to become the Augean stable of email accounts in short order. Who’s going to manage it? And what of legal liabilities? And unintended consequences?

Of course, if Google does pull this off it may well upend traditional news as we know it. “The fact that Google is trying this is, in one sense, testament to an abject failure on the part of traditional news operations,” says Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media. “With the Net, they could have given people the chance to comment in this way–above and beyond the standard comment published as part of a story or a letter to the editor. They didn’t, and left this opening. If Google pulls this off, it will be a huge boost for one company–Google–because people looking for responses to news articles will head to the search site, not just to the site of the original story.”

Observers have pointed out the irony of the situation, because Google’s terms of service prohibit other sites from reproducing or creating derivative works from Google News, so it will be the only place they can get it. Yet Google News wouldn’t even exist if news providers were to demand it abide by similar terms.