Ping-O-Matic has been online exactly one year, and their stats from the last 365 days will make your jaw drop. According to the Ping-O-Matic website, they have pinged nearly 100,000,000 times and are sending pings at about the rate of 1,000,000 a day. In fact, the two founders of the service Dougal Campbell and Matt Mullenweg state that “A year ago, if you had suggested numbers like that to us, we probably would have laughed.”

For those of you who don’t know what Ping-O-Matic is, this explanation from the website will give you a pretty good idea.

Pinging lets dozens of services know you’ve updated your site and increases traffic to your blog.

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.

So why would you want to be on these sites? One word: traffic. Blogrolling scripts like blogrolling.com and WordPress check update services to see if you’ve updated and then they reflect that on everyone’s site, usually by moving you to the top of people’s blogrolling list or putting a recently updated indicator by your link. Services like Technorati spider your links to tell who’s linking to you and who you’re linking to, almost in real time. If you show up on someone’s Technorati link list for their site (often called an “egorati search”) they’re likely to visit your site to see what you said, increasing your exposure. Other sites like weblogs.com and blo.gs list the most recently updated blogs and many people browse these to find something new when they’re bored. Many of the different services offer their own forms for pinging just that service, but keeping track of all those and hitting each one whenever you update would be a hassle.

[Read the blog post and wish Ping-O-Matic a Happy Birthday]