The Twitter-verse continues to get interesting. I've always felt that the returns are to be found around Twitter rather than with Twitter itself, and the venture capital community seems to be acting from the same position. Twitter interaction platform HootSuite just announced a new round of venture capital funding, with $1.9 million in fresh money coming in the door to support its growth efforts.

HootSuite, which was started by Invoke Media in November 2008, has evolved into a brand monitoring, file-sharing and social media integration utility. Only a year later, it has attracted more than 300,000 users, from Time (TWX) to Martha Stewart to the White House to Aol (AOL).BloggingStocks is among the Aol blogs using HootSuite.

Over the years, I've used a variety of blogging platforms. So far, my favorite is WordPress, which is the mastermind of Automattic.

Today there's some good news for WordPress users -- the company snagged $29.5 million in a round of financing. The investors include Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners and the New York Times (NYSE: NYT).

And yes, the founding developer of WordPress, Matthew Mullenweg, has a blog post about the funding and the company's history. Keep in mind that there have been more than 5.8 million downloads of the software, with over 3.8 million in 2007. With such a base, the company has been generating a good amount of revenues (and now has about 18 full-time employees).

Writes Matt: "Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more -- small, open-source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far."

If you want to see other interesting venture capital investments, visit DealProfiles.com.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.