In the blogosphere, pinging is like telling everyone that you’ve just updated your blog. Well, not exactly everyone. There are certain services that scans blog regularly for updates and publishes the recently updated blogs. So you only need to tell these services once you’ve updated your blog by pinging them, and they will tell the world about your updated blog.

Most blogging software already have build-in ability to ping those kind of services. Usually, you only need to enter the address of the service, and everytime you publish a new post on your blog, it will automatically ping the services on the list.

A blog ping is just a piece of text, in simple words. It’ll contain your blog name and the url. A blog ping is usually sent in the XML format. The servers that accept ping have specialiced procedures for accepting and processing these ‘XML pings’. The API, a bridge between server and developer, available for XML format is XML-RPC. There is another API to ping the server, called REST.

There are several sources for the list of XML-RPC (and RPC2) ping services. EliottBack has a huge list of RPC and RPC2 services (over 56 RPC and RPC2). Emily (from HowToBlog) also put about 20-25 RPC and RPC2 service on her blog. Another one is from Ensight who has a list of around 43 RPC ping services.

The question is, do you have to use them all? In my opinion, no. Most of the ping services do ‘pararel’ ping, they also ping another ping service. So actually, you only need to choose several of them that, if combined, can cover the whole XML-RPC blog ping service. Or, choose the one that is reliable and popular enough.

My recommendation:

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
api.feedster.com/ping
api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
ping.blo.gs/
ping.feedburner.com
ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
rpc.pingomatic.com/
rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Pingoat is a good replacement for Ping-O-Matic (still down?). It covers over 54 ping services, including the other XML-RPC services I recommend above.