If you ping Technorati directly via our web form, it reduces the number of moving parts required to process the ping. It also offers a crawl-time advantage to Technorati members who have claimed the URL that they are pinging for; those pings go into a higher priority queue. However, we realize that most bloggers rely on the XML-RPC ping capabilities of their blog content management systems (CMS) and, much of the time, that works just fine. However, this past week we isolated a distinct but minor drop off in the update flow to us via Ping-o-Matic's XML-RPC interface. The web-form pings on Ping-o-Matic appear to have been flowing to us uninterrupted but not the XML-RPC pings. The problem was resolved last night, all of the Ping-o-Matic pings are flowing in again and we'd like to thank the folks at Ping-o-Matic for addressing this issue promptly.
The significance of this is that the Ping-O-Matic XML-RPC interface is the default ping destination used by Wordpress installations, as well as some other blog CMS'. If that's the case for your blog and it was not crawled this week to pick up a posting you've made, please ping us directly ("When in doubt, ping the direct route!").
Here's a tip: when you see the link to ping your claimed blogs on the Technorati home page or on the ping page itself, drag that link to your browser's bookmarks and put it on the browser toolbar. Then, whenever you post to your blog you can conveniently hit that bookmark. That ping will come in to us directly and, as long as you're logged into Technorati, be given high priority in our crawl queue.
