Automattic, the company behind WordPress and WordPress.com has taken a new direction in its activity with the announcement of a new website called FoodPress.com. FoodPress features blog posts aggregated from food blogs sitting on WordPress.com, and that’s what makes it so interesting. It’s a new venture into the world of verticals, sites that concentrate on a certain topic, with posts sucked in from other sources. The potential for these sites is huge and almost limitless: sites could be about fashion, dating, parenthood, startups, web development, etc. etc. But one of the things that makes this source interesting is that it’s not machine-made: posts are chosen by the FoodPress editor Jane Maynard who is scanning tag pages related to food like food, recipes and baking.
This venture is win-win for Automattic and for the bloggers on WordPress.com. Automattic is showing the love to its bloggers, by giving them the opportunity to get more exposure for their posts. This encourages bloggers to open blogs on WordPress.com and stay there, which is good for Automattic since many of those bloggers are or may become paying customers.
Darnell Clayton over at the Blog Herald wonders whether Automattic will open up the site to self-hosted WordPress users. I can’t see that happening since I think the point of this is to support the WordPress.com community. However, maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone to start a site like this for WordPress.org users…