Leveraging the continuing popularity of food blogging and its own vast content collection, WordPress.com has just launched FoodPress, the service's first swipe at niche content aggregation.

FoodPress is a hand-curated collection of food-related posts from across the WordPress.com network. Using the tagline, "serving up the hottest dishes on WordPress.com," FoodPress will be updated each weekday to offer excerpts and links to the latest food-related posts, photos and recipes on WordPress.com. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has partnered with Federated Media to handle the publishing, and, we assume, advertising opportunities for FoodPress.

While additions to the FoodPress blog are hand-picked, most content is aggregated and discovered by going through food-related tags across WordPress.com. There is a post on the FoodPress site that details how to get featured on FoodPress, but there is no way to submit a site or post for inclusion directly.







FoodPress's blog also says that it has plans to find and incorporate WordPress.org blogs into the mix in the future, but for now the target is just WordPress.com.

As a potential vertical and monetization strategy, FoodPress is pretty interesting. WordPress.com is able to leverage content in its networks, sell ads on that content (well, ads on those excerpts) and drive more pageviews to WordPress.com as a whole.

The big question will be how the community embraces the idea. The platitudes about "helping drive visitors to your content" is nice and all, but this is still a business.

Assuming FoodPress is a success and an overall traffic driver, we expect that other niche content aggregators or "presses" will be launched, too.

As it stands, it's a nice way to find lots of food-related content and an example of how Automattic can leverage the content it hosts.

What do you think of FoodPress?

Disclosure: Federated Media is one of Mashable's advertising partners.