If you use FeedBurner, we now provide a service that notifies aggregators, search engines, and directories about your content updates as quickly as possible. When you use the new PingShot service, we will 'ping' a collection of services that you choose whenever we detect that your feed has new content. It's that simple. Select the new PingShot service for your feed from the "Publicize" tab, and you're done.
Podcast-Sensitive
PingShot is smart about whether your feed is primarily a podcast feed or not. If it is primarily a podcast feed, a different set of default notifications are sent, and a few different choices about who you want to notify are presented. For example, podcast feeds automatically notify Odeo by default, but non-podcast feeds do not notify Odeo by default, because that would be silly.
There are other nitty gritty details about this service, so let's dive into those.
Open Registry
PingShot presents aggregators, directories, and search engines with an open ping registry, so that any service can participate in this service, not just those that we know about or decide to include. Any third party that would like to be included as one of the notification options can submit their service name and ping interface to us, and we'll go through a process here to validate that it's functioning appropriately and then include it as an option. As we begin to manage more feeds around the world, there is simply no way that we'll keep up on our own with language and geography-specific aggregators, search engines, etc. and an open registry hopefully addresses this.
Spam!
We have built several mechanisms into PingShot that are designed to make it useless to blog spammers. Some of these are reflected in the way the interface and service work, but more of these are designed into our ping algorithm and will be adjusted as we monitor how the service is used. Our goal is to make all of our services as simple as possible for real publishers and as useless as possible for spammers and other naughty types.
Determining Default Services
We have relationships with all of the default services, and through these relationships, we are comfortable that we know where to go when there are issues, we know that we're not going to get rate limited, we are working with these companies to manage the flow of inappropriate updates, and we have confidence that we can work together to make PingShot a more compelling service over time. Our approach is to slowly add services to the default list as we build more relationships instead of remove services from the default list if we can't figure out how to work with the organization. These lists will undoubtedly evolve over time.
Mini FAQ
1. Why isn't XYZ service on your list?
We're still in the process of adding some known services to the list, and we're probably missing a bunch. We added and tested our defaults and pulled some others from a common relay point. It's open, so submit the service, and we'll add it after we've had a chance to test it. Everybody can play.
2. So does this replace Ping-O-Matic or other ping services?
No. This is a passive "set and forget" service and only functions for publishers for whom we are managing feeds. We check your feed, and IF your content has been updated since we last checked, then we initiate our ping algorithm and notify the publisher-selected channels that there has been an update. You can use our service to notify Ping-O-Matic, which will in turn relay updates to other services.
3. Are you paying attention to RSS Ping? What about FeedMesh? Are you familiar with the Atom stream that Brad implemented for Six Apart? Are you afraid of Virginia Woolf?
You betcha. We know David and Matt have thought carefully and thoroughly about notifications, and we are paying close attention to their work. Our system has been architected to fully support their specification. There is quite a bit of community interest and effort around notification services, obviously, and we'll try to make sure we do our part to be a good citizen.
4. How can I submit my service to PingShot?
If you want your service to know when FeedBurner feeds have been updated (aggregators, search engines, podcast directories this means you), fill out our submission form.
5. This is getting long. Can you sum up?
We're delighted to launch another free service to help our publishers get more value from the content they create. Back to work.
