ReadWriteWeb

BlockChalk, an unusual location based service that has yet to launch publicly but will focus on allowing users to post messages to their neighbors, announced today that it has hired Ian Kallen, an engineer who helped build high-profile blog search engine Technorati for 5 years.

Kallen said of the BlockChalk team, "their vision coincided with my long-standing interests in virtual communities and bringing them to real communities." The small startup was founded in late 2009 and includes former Delicious engineers Josh Whiting and Stephen Hood and was funded by Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, among others.

Company blogs are a good way to post press releases and make staff and product announcements. But they're always particularly helpful when startups use them to share "lessons learned" from various stages of the entrepreneurial process.

Last month, anonymous neighborhood messaging service BlockChalk announced that it had secured a $1.5 million investment, the company's first. Today BlockChalk updated its blog today with some of the lessons the founders learned from raising angel investment.

BlockChalk, the anonymous location-based social networking service, just announcedthat it is now a venture-backed startup. BlockChalk's investors include Battery Ventures, Mitch Kapor, Harrison Metal, Founder Collective, Joshua Schachter, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney, and David Liu. The company, which focuses on giving neighborhoods a forum to share information, plans to use its new funding to hire more engineers and expand its service aggressively.

Location based social networks - are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

BlockChalk is an anonymous message board for your neighborhood. The company's founders want to enable neighbors to interact with each other while protecting everybody's privacy. At it's core, BlockChalk feels a bit like an anonymous, location-based Twitter clone.

BlockChalk just released its native iPhone app (iTunes link) today and also offers an app for the Palm Pre and Pixi. Android users can access the service through a mobile website.