Questioning Ping-O-Matic

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!)