Wordpress Partners! But Is This Good?

Automattic, the company powering the almighty blogging software that is WordPress, and the enterprise RSS experts, KnowNow have just very recently, reported that a partnership with WordPress has indeed happened! It is reported, at the KnowNow blog, that the two companies, that is to say Automattic and KnowNow will be offering a joint product, designed specifically for Wordpress blogs that reads and blogs feeds of websites, both public and private. What did TechCrunch say? Well, as usual, they had the expected take on the subject, simple, yet true.

This is a good move that could make a big difference in the rate of adoption of social software in the business world as few things go together like blogging and RSS.

The company’s VP, Todd Rulon-Miller, has seen KnowNow expand its long and impressive customer list greatly. The former Senior VP at Netscape has also helped raise the company many millions of dollars in funding, with the most recent announcement being made at the beginning of this month, claiming that a humongous $13 million has been added to their ever-growing bank account. There’s no doubt about it, that Todd has done a great job, and we should respect him for that. It’s really down to him that all of this has happened at KnowNow.

Based in California, KnowNow is a well-built up company that has been around for years. Their offices have been around before RSS was even out and about, but has only recently relaunched, with a whole new angle to its business, focusing on syndication. Really Simple Syndication at that… What does KnowNow offer? I quote, ‘Information via RSS from various sources that don’t publish native feeds. Those types of adapters, pulling information from various databases inside the enterprise and from around the web and making it available for feed readers, are now a common practice in enterprise RSS.’

Many early adopters of the new KnowNow WordPress Enterprise Edition will be sure proud to brag about it. It’s quite possible that many major blogging networks (b5media and Gawker) might even take up the company’s services. Of course though, unlike Wordpress, the service is not free. Like TechCrunch said, this will be an interesting one for the blogosphere.