The Ping Folly

Ben Trott provides a fresh perspective on Ping mechanisms. Generally tools have pinged weblogs.com and blo.gs for years. But of late, there are more and more parties interested in receiving direct pings, rather than federating based off of the updates that weblogs.com and blo.gs have always propagated. It's a bit ridiculous to suggest that direct pinging is the only possible technical way to find out about updates to a site. Google and other search engines seem to do pretty well in keeping their indexes current, even though they don't receive any pings. And they're indexing billions of web sites, while there are only tens of millions of weblogs. The ping federation was expected to solve at least some of the problems, but has not done till now . With Services like TypePad and LiveJournal, the issue of authentication & spam pings is not as problematic – they can now on – with a stream of updates to blogs on services that listeners can watch.