Feedburner Pingshot Deconstructed

If you’re using Feedburner, I’m sure you’re aware of an option under Publicize called Pingshot that “pings” all the major aggregators whenever you make a new blog post.

From Feedburner:

PingShot is a quick notification service that enables your feed to be updated in the widest variety of places as quickly as you add new content.

There are a lot of different aggregators, search engines and like services with more coming on the market every day. Each of these services follows a different schedule when polling for new content. Without PingShot, it can take between 30 minutes and six hours for content to be updated everywhere it is consumed.

I’m pretty certain this blog pings a variety of aggregators after making each post. But I do care about how quick my content is disseminated on the web. With Pingshot, I don’t have to worry about that. However, choosing which aggregators to ping can be a bit confusing for some.

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Here’s the lowdown:

Technorati: The mother of all aggregators. Leave it checked if you value your life.

My Yahoo!: Ping-o-matic (see below) already pings My Yahoo! for you, so I dunno if pinging it for the second time will give you an advantage. This isn’t an aggregator either, but by pinging My Yahoo!, users subscribed to you will be able to get your freshest content sooner.

Ping-o-matic: A no-brainer. This isn’t an aggregator per se, but you’d want to include this service because it takes the pain out of pinging the most important aggregators out there. Funny that Pingshot also pings Feedburner.

Bloglines: A must-have. Bloglines is an aggregator, search engine, news reader and blog creator rolled into one. Up-to-the minute too.

Newsgator: A very popular online news reader. Again, Ping-o-matic takes care of this.

Blogdigger: Search engine for blogs and RSS. I noticed that they are more than a month late in updating my posts. And yes, Ping-o-matic has it too.

Blog Buzz Machine: Looks pretty useless. I tried to sign up but didn’t get a confirmation email.

FeedBlitz: An RSS and blog to email service. If you are using this service to gather email subscribers, then it can be very useful for you.

Google Blog Search Pinging Service: Google has its own blog search engine that is injected constantly with new blog content. Highly recommended.

Blogblogs: A popular news aggregator in Brazil. Not for everyone, unless you blog in Portuguese.

Bloggarkivet.net: A Norwegian blog search engine. Again, not for everyone.

Bloggrevyen: Another Norwegian aggregator and pinging service.

Feed Crier: Service that delivers RSS feeds to your instant messenger. Not my cup of tea, IMO.

Moreover: Unless you’re a big-time online newspaper or syndicated blogger, don’t bother, but then again, Ping-o-matic pings them for you.

Alexa: I didn’t know Alexa can be pinged. Looks suspect to me. They do have a search engine that no one uses except when checking their traffic ranks.

Snap: A fairly new kid on the block that gained popularity through its cool snapshot service. Their search engine looks promising, although not sure of its up-to-date-ness.

Syndic8: A nice feed subscription directory. I don’t see any advantage in pinging them though. Leave this out, since Ping-o-matic has it covered anyway.

Tailrank: Tracks popular blog posts much like Digg. Their search gives me an error right now.

Weblogs.com: Another pinging service, but provides no detailed information.

IceRocket: A very updated blog search engine. Recommended, although Pingomatic got it covered too.

Simply log on to your Feedburner account, choose a feed and click Publicize > Pingshot. You are given up to 10 options. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Technorati
2. My Yahoo!
3. Bloglines
4. Pingomatic
5. Newsgator
6. Google Blog Search Pinging Service
7. Icerocket
8. Weblogs.com
9. Blogdigger
10. For #10, I’d choose Blogblogs, since you may get a few more valuable hits from our friends in South America than in Norway. Go for Feedblitz if you have email subscribers (I don’t).

Happy Pinging!