yes....ping is the feature, i am using selfhosted wordpress and my posts took around 1 minute to index in google
Wordpress.com recently announced a plan in the future where bloggers could put up their own ads for a paid upgrade. That should make things interesting. They also mentioned that they already put ads on some blogs now, (they mentioned that somebody has to pay the power bills) but you can't see them on your own blog. I know I "accidently" seen these ads on my own blog and it kinda freaked me out, as I was blogging about how much I hated walmart and then afterwards my post was surrounded by ads for specials at walmart!!
I thought from the earleir posts it was a wordpress hosted feature. Does the same apply for your own hosted blog? are they pinged and indexed in the same way or do you have to add a plugin? Paul
I am interested in knowing answer to the following question. My guess is that it is a pluggin. Fingers crossed.
Sounds good for you. You can continue to get this traffic if you continue to add more content in your blog. Google give a New Content Boost to new pages and new sites, this boost helps them rank high in search results.
How soon in the future ? that would be sweet !! Yes you can set up the ping on your own blog, pretty much any site with an rss feed - has the ability to ping, you can use Feedburner.com. You can add a list of sites to your ping list / who you'd like to notify each time you post - on your own blog. I am pretty sure that it is just a regular feature on your blogs - you may need to add more services to it. But it depends on your own blog and it's age etc. as to how soon it will be indexed.