Pinging and Why Everyone's Doing It

If you've blogged for any length of time, like an hour, you've probably come across the term "ping" somewhere out there in the blogosphere by now, or else right in your own blog dashboard. For instance, Blogger gives you the option in the Settings > Publishing tab to send pings to Weblogs.com, which tracks updates to blogs on a near real-time basis.

But I'm already getting ahead of myself - what are these "pings" exactly? A ping is a digital signal (in XML-RPC format, if you care) that your blogging platform or another pinging piece of software can send out on your behalf each time your blog has been updated with new content. Pings are typically used by blog and RSS search and tracking services like search engines, news and RSS aggregators, and RSS feed generators and managers like FeedBurner. So they're a pretty hot commodity for services that want to make sure they're including the latest blog content as soon as it's been published. For example, following a ping, a blog search engine will know to send its crawlers through your blog to index your most recent post for its search results.

Pings also allow these blogophilic services (yes, I just made that term up) to allocate its resources wisely: if there's no ping, they'll assume there's no new content, and will send their crawlers to go index some fresh content instead rather than recrawl what's already in their database.

For you, the blogger, this makes pings a very good thing. Lots of sites out there are just waiting to receive them, eager to include your blog's content prominently in their search listings or RSS feeds. And pings are free to send and can either be sent automatically, or in mere seconds via a manual pinging service.

What's a manual pinging service? Well, one limitation of some automated pingers, like the built-in one in Blogger, is that it doesn't ping all the sites out there that are waiting to hear from you. So there's a need for services that can send multiple pings en masse to many ping-hungry sites at once. All you do is enter your blog's name and URL, select the sites you'd like to ping, and the pingers will do the rest. Here are three well-known ones for you to try:

Ping-O-Matic
PingOat
Blog Flux Ping Service

Let the pinging begin!

Key terms: ping, pinging, blogflux, blog flux, pingomatic, ping-o-matic, pingoat, pingout, ping oat, ping out, send pings