I’m not sure when this content came up on Technorati, but it is interesting to see how the rate of garbage in pings forced them to switch to simply poling the blog feeds directly (which is exactly the behaviour that pings should have addressed).
Welcome to the former ping page
As of the relaunch of Technorati on October 14, 2009, we are no longer using pings; you no longer need to inform us each time you update your page. We are now automatically checking sites frequently to find new posts, without anything (except the post itself) needed from you.
Why the change? More than 90% of the pings we received were spam and non-blogs. A significant amount of our energy was devoted to attempting to find, without fail, the valid blog pings obscured by the torrent of junk. This endeavor demanded an unreasonable amount of resources (both automated and human) while remaining fragile and error-prone.
A pure polling method cannot ensure real time data (assuming that standard crawler politeness is adhered to). Perhaps CloudRSS and PubSubHubub will really be the future.
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