I remember, last year, when Ping-O-Matic was down (and before Pingoat was around) and I’d just started blogging I used a service called King Ping.

King Ping is a site which pings sites such as Weblogs.com and Technorati and tells them that your blog is updated. Depending on the site you are pinging, the site’s spider may respider your site or you may appear on a Recently Updated page.

King Ping has an interesting history. Frédérick Giasson created a post announcing his pinging service (which at the time wasn’t AJAX). Interestingly enough, I was the first commenter on this post, but I can’t remember how I found it! Several days later, a thread began for thinking of a name for Fred’s Pinging service. From their, the name King Ping was born.
Several weeks later, Sudar (a blogger, that at time, I read) released the AJAX version, which is still around today.

King Ping’s AJAX runs very smoothly, though I don’t like the fonts and colours used throughout the site. For some reason, I find the constant use of grey quite depressing; and I think a nice blue gradient would revamp the site.

King Ping has a few other faults. It claims to be able to ping BlogShares, but in fact it can’t. BlogShares RPC is only available to approved parties (Pingoat and Ping-O-Matic), so BlogShares refuses connections from anyone else. Another fault is it doesn’t provide an RPC. This stops you adding it to your blogging software to automatically ping after each update. Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat, however, do offer RPCs.

King Ping doesn’t ping as many services as Pingoat, but it does have less ads and the main thing Pingoat is lacking: AJAX.

Ping-O-Matic is still the largest pinging service, though it is by no means the best service. With a few adjustments, such as a RPC, King Ping can easily become the biggest.

Tags: king ping, kping, ping, pinger, RPC, technorati, weblogs.com, blog, blogs, blogosphere, AJAX, web2, web 2.0