I’ve never really talked to Matt from WP. The only time we ever corresponded was through email. I had just finished the acquisition of Eatonweb Portal and relaunched the site as Blog Flux Directory. Seeing a major hole in a lack of a centralized-blog-service site, I emailed everyone asking for ideas on what to add. A friend of mine, Kailash Nadh, had just released a pinger of his own at Pingoat. So when Matt replied with ‘pinging service’ - I thought, why not? I could use/point to Ping-o-matic, but that defeated the point - another source for bloggers to use, not the same one. The response was not pretty. Lots of random accusations - you know, the usual :)

Anyhoo - what we got out of that entire incident was that Matt had a good point - open proxy. Kailash in the meantime had developed his own anti-splog system, and we used his. With the recent explosion in spam, even checking them turned out to be a headache, but that story is for another day :)

Incidentally, Kailash had to sell the site. He was unable to pay for it, and had to turn it over to someone with deeper pockets.

And today I came across this: Pingomatic.com vs Pingoat - reach and rank.

I’m sure Pingomatic does a lot more pings due to XML-RPC, and while Alexa is far from a reliable source, it is astounding (to me) that Pingoat is neck-to-neck with Pingomatic.

I don’t have any point or morale other than to point out how much Pingoat was originally criticized (before we were even around), and now it is a reliable second (or even first) choice for many.