Weblog Ping Services

Introduction

Ping servers support an XML-RPC interface allowing weblogs to register their URLs and the fact that they've updated recently. The system was invented by Dave Winer in 2001 for weblogs.com, which was launched in 2001 and is still the most well-known of the ping servers. As of late 2004 there were at least 50 ping servers; a subset of this list is encoded into many weblog packages (since they must all be pinged to ensure that everyone knows about your update). Alternatively, blog software may use a meta-ping service such as Ping-o-Matic to delegate the task of pinging to multiple services.

FeedTree

There is some (well-founded) concern that this centralized system is not scalable or cost-effective for providers. FeedTree makes this problem vacuous; by distributing weblog updates immediately, the need for a separate ping service is entirely obviated. Read more on the FeedTree weblog: FeedTree and the "ping crisis".

FeedBurner?

Side note: Weblog owners who already delegate to FeedBurner the task of hosting their RSS feeds can use FeedBurner's new Pingshot service, which further delegates pinging responsibilities to FeedBurner.

"We check your feed, and IF your content has been updated since we last checked, then we initiate our ping algorithm and notify the publisher-selected channels that there has been an update. You can use our service to notify Ping-O-Matic, which will in turn relay updates to other services."

For FeedBurner's existing customers, this is a helpful feature. However, because of the dependency it introduces upon the central FeedBurner service, we believe this is unlikely to be a solution which works for the entire weblog ecosystem.