"What?!" I hear some people say.

A 'ping' is a simple piece of code that alerts the web spiders to your site having been updated. You type in the URL of your blog, choose the sites you want to update and click the 'ping' button. An alert is automatically sent to the spiders to trawl your site. I means your latest information is automatically updated on the major search engines (and if you're a blogging guru you will also be pleased to know that it also helps your position on other blogrolls).

As Ping-O-Matic states: "There are a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. However it would be expensive for all the services to crawl all the blogs in the world all the time. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you’ve updated so they can come check you out. They get the freshest data possible, you don’t get a thousand robots spidering your site all the time. Everybody wins.

And…

So why would you want to be on these sites? One word: traffic."

There are a couple of free 'Ping' sites available - Ping-O-Matic and Fred's Ping Service. A warning however - don't ping a site if it hasn't been updated - whilst a rabid drooling monster with large teeth won't automatically descend from the heavens and tear you into small pieces ... a few million bloggers who rely on people not abusing the system very well might!