@ryan: i think pingomatics url is just a redirection and runs on the same servers as wordpress.com.. how come? blog.pingomatic.com actually is a wordpress.com blog. i know, that doesn´t mean anything and could just be for that subdomain, but like i said "i think", that doesn´t mean i know anything at all lol.

Like Jeff already quoted in the post, it shares some folks with automattic and probably they just do not label it as official automattic project because they didn´t want to make it seem like this is to push wordpress, which was probably the intention of this project - to make wordpress blogs more visible to the public - which of course for us is a good thing. I don´t know much about automattic, but i know about marketing. Whatever it is, i believe they just do not want to work with other companies officialy, so they started a new company for that.

i think pingomatic is also a big part why wordpress pages already get good SEO rankings and are indexed very fast without doing much about it. Many people use it without even noticing it.

just had another idea: could the antitrust agency be an issue when automattic teams up with let´s say technorati? i know it could be in europe, but don´t know about the US.