ping-o-matic

The Blog Herald has posted an interesting piece on an unannounced change in WordPress 2.8. Basically, Wordpress no longer notifies other servers of your updated articles at the same time you post those articles.

Blogger Christian Bolstad found a new feature in WordPress 2.8, undocumented and not among the release notes in the Codex. Basically, it changes the notification behavior of WordPress, from notifying ping services like Pingomatic and others you might use automatically when publishing a post or editing a previously published post, to doing a once an hour notification using the built-in pseudo cron.

I doubt that the change to ping only once an hour in itself is that big of a deal to most bloggers. The biggest problem is that the change was undocumented. Even in the world of open source which demands transparency such an omission may not qualify as a sin, but it does qualify as the basis of for conspiracy theories and blogger rants. I wonder if this change will stick in the next version of Wordpress?

I have two Ping-O-Matic related questions that I cannot find answers too. Maybe someone can help me find the answer to these two burning questions:

1. Why is Ping-O-Matic so popular for pinging the blog search engines?
   
   
2. Is anyone else bothered when they see that the blog at Ping-O-Matic has not been updated since April of 2006?

By no means am I saying anything bad about Ping-O-Matic. I just find it curious that Web applications such as Wordpress and Drupal by default point to Ping-O-Matic. Why not point your CMS to alternative ping services such as Pingoat or Blog Flux?

As to the stale blog at Ping-O-Matic...it is driving me crazy. I keep hoping when Ping-O-Matic is down for a day or two that they'll post an explanation at their site. Sometimes I would like to know if the problem is on my end or their end. Is a blog really a blog if there are no posts being logged? (Try saying that three times really quick!)