Pings and Things
Do you Ping when you post? Personally, I ping everyone in sight. My secret nickname is Pingalot. I used to do it the hard way, website by website. Now, Pingomatic gives me a one-click PingFest round all the major consumers of Pings.
Pinging is more an obsession than a hobby. An attempt to let the universe know you’ve just posted. It’s a bit like a chicken’s cockadoodledoo when she’s just laid an egg. It probably says something dark and intense about the Pinger, I suspect.
I have a theory that all great geniuses in history were, by nature, Pingers. How else did we get to know about what they did, after all? Pinging is also good for your health. It provides a cathartic moment to round off the long gestation of creation. A Ping a day keeps the doctor away, as a modern grannie might say.
But there is a downside to pinging : other pingers. They are the ones who ping YOU. They are usually intent on leaving all manner of nasty traces of their presence on your computer. We have Firewalls to keep them out. Pinging is a very selfish business indeed.
Do you Ping?
Initially I just pinged Technorati. Then I started pinging a few others, blo.gs most notably. But now BlogExplosion has a ping service that pings everyone in sight so I use that. I don’t trust it completely, however, so I still ping Technorati manually. How does one tell whether it actually does any good, however?
By Gone Away on October 21st, 2005 at 9:32 pm
For Technorati, Clive, just look under the tag (or category) for a while after you’ve pinged, and you should see your post appear on their rolling list. In other terms, if you watch your stats you should see Technorati traffic to that post coming from the page itself and by search terms. The same basically applies for the other search engines.
By John on October 22nd, 2005 at 8:11 am