Google is undoubtedly a powerhouse. I won't argue that. That is not to say however that a local blogging service like I.PH is automatically inferior. I.PH's photo gallery is pretty impressive in its own right and has a few tricks up its sleeve too. For instance, all pics in your I.PH photo gallery can be used to personalize your blog with just a few clicks of your mouse. You can also fine tune the privacy settings of your pics to specify who can see which photos, no passwords needed. Aside from a photo gallery, you also get an integrated audio gallery which makes podcasting extremely easy.
I.PH offers easy adsense integration as well, for both free and paid accounts. It's also easy to specify where you want the ads to appear on your blog. That part of the layout is drag and drop.
I.PH is an innovation from DotPH, the Philippine Domain Registry. Our servers are the hub of the Philippine Internet Domain Name System and we are one of the first registries worldwide to implement a Shared Registry System, which allowed for realtime domain search, registration and management 24/7. We've been in the internet game since 1989 and we're definitely here to stay.
Thanks Peter and Orly for your inputs. I'd really like to have 2 blogs. Because of limited time to blog though, I can maintain one only. Since my nickname is still available in i.ph, I decided to continue the i.ph blog in the meantime and just reserved the blogspot. If there's time, I'd explore blogspot and compare with i.ph. BTW, this is my blog: http://tom.i.ph (Think Of Me!)