Professional bloggers say that the basic step to market your blog post is to have your ping list in order. For beginners, what does the term “Ping” really mean?
Accoring to Wikepedia, Ping is a tool that sends an XML-RPC signal to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. It further states that many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post (or updates an old one.)
Open ping servers, like VeriSign’s Weblogs.com and Yahoo!’s blo.gs, let other web-services subscribe to a list of blogs that have recently pinged them. Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly-updated blogs. Similarly, aggregators use results from ping servers to tell subscribers which items on their subscription lists have fresh material.
A few of the blog aggregators that can be pinged directly include: BulkFeeds, FeedBurner, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, Technorati, and Yahoo
In addition to open ping servers, there are an increasing number of proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their own applications. Most of the major blog search engines operate such ping servers.
There is a conflict of interest here between the blogger–who wants his new post to get the widest possible publicity as fast as possible–and the web-service owner–who wants his search engine or aggregator to have new blog posts long before anyone else.
As a result, bloggers have turned to services such as Ping-o-matic, which pings multiple proprietary ping servers. As the blogosphere has grown, other ping “services” have cropped up, such as Pingoat and BlogFlux Pinger.
Information Technology 