WordPress.com just announced the launch of FoodPress, the blog host’s first foray into aggregating content written by its users. FoodPress wants to become the “go-to destination for the hottest dishes from WordPress.com bloggers” and in order to do so, the company has partnered with Federated Media and enlisted the help of Jane Maynard as the site’s editor.
To get featured on the site, WordPress.com’s Jay Victory recommends that bloggers use food-related tags like food, recipes, baking or cocktails so that their posts are more easily discoverable for the site’s editor. According to Victory, the service’s bloggers currently post “thousands of mouth-watering recipes and food stories every day.”
More Verticals to Come?
Chances are that this won’t remain WordPress.com’s only attempt at establishing destination sites for different verticals. It’s easy to imagine similar sites that aggregate the best travel blogs on WordPress.com, for example.
There are, of course, also some ulterior motives here besides helping readers to discover content on WordPress.com. If FoodPress becomes popular, it could not only bring more traffic to WordPress.com blogs, but also provide some SEO advantage to the sites that are listed there.