This is a technical note only of interest to bloggers, so normal humans can skip ahead. Jeremy C. Wright has assembled a list of 41 services that your blogging software should ping each time you post a new entry. For the uninitiated, pings tell the world “I have new stuff” and represent an important difference between weblogs and regular old websites.
For Movable Type users, you can add this list to the ‘Others’ text box under ‘Notify the following sites when I update my blog’ on the ‘Preferences’ page.
UPDATE: Boris wrote to discourage me from ping-spamming, and suggested Pingomatic as an alternative. I replied that Pingomatic only covers 12 services–what about the others? After all, don’t they exist to receive pings?
Some of the ping services are language- or content-specific. Just like spam, some of those ping services really wouldn’t care about your content. I think a more useful list would include the purpose/end audience of each service, then people could decide which are important. Pingomatic covers off all the major ones, IMHO — you are probably covering *at least* 80% of your target market.
Boris makes a good point about a contextual list. I’m not really sold on Pingomatic though. Once I choose the services I want to ping (whether that’s 3 or 43), I dump them into my blogging software and Bob’s your uncle. What happens if Pingomatic falls over, or disappears entirely? I’m pingless.
Jeremy’s list is up to 43 services, but he’s only pinging about 30 of them now. Hey Jeremy, which 30 is that?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Please! *Don’t* ping all those separately, use http://www.pingomatic.com/about/ (the only URL you need is http://rpc.pingomatic.com).
Boris and I are discussing this. I’ll report back once he edjumakates me.
I agree, don’t ping them all. I disagree that the top 12 reach 80% of your audience. That’s like saying that emailing the top 12 bloggers reaches 80% of bloggers 😉
I’ll be cleaning my list up later this week so I’m only pinging about a dozen, one of which’ll be pingomatic.
Personally I think Pingomatic’s a great idea. Still, a great big list of Pinging resources is never a bad thing to have sitting around.
Matt’s updated Pingomatic, so now I’m ONLY pinging rpc.pingomatic.com.
Blogger wont allow you to ping anyone except Weblogs.com so blogspot users can’t run the rpc.pingomatic.com option (get with the program google … sheesh!). I used to ping the services seperately (about 5 of them) now run ping-o-matic – much faster and nicer.
It looks like Typepad doesn’t allow customized ping-targets. Maybe (hopefully) one of your astute readers can prove me wrong.