An Automattic ray of sunshine

Trying to look for evidence that the Chicken Littles dominating the business conversation this week are overracting, I grabbed onto the story yesterday about Automattic getting $29 million in funding.  Automattic is the company that offers the WordPress blogging platform and service.  It currently is arguably the most popular platform right now, and has achieved this with only $1 million in investment until now, so this much incredible infusion of capital suggests even greater potential for the company.

What I believe it suggests -- given the fact that one of the investors is The New York Times -- is how mainstream blogging is becoming in terms of relative influence.  This nugget from the Wall Street Journal article linked above is the reason:

The Times, which uses WordPress to publish the blogs on its Web site, hopes to share content with WordPress and possibly publish interesting blog posts that have been composed with its software.

In the past 6-9 months, The New York Times has experimented with showing reader comments alongside its headlines and leads on its home page, and has rolled out blogrunner to give readers a view of blog conversations resulting from specific news stories.  Now, the Times sees content generated by any person using WordPress to create a blog and publish opinions, insight and commentary as being valuable to present to its readers.  To me, it is responding to the growing evidence that peer-generated content is relatively more influential to consumers (of any product or service) than traditional media or even company Web site content.

While there may be signs of a slowdown elsewhere in the economy and tech, it doesn't seem to be in social media.  What is your take?