My new blog was listed in Google in 3 days. Just submit to article directories. Ok not a deep crawl but still 1 page indexed is better than nothing. And don't forget the sitemap. My new blog was listed in Google before Yahoo and MSN. This surprised me.
i put a link to my new project cmyfriends.net from my blog in the evening and it was indexed (basic indexing) the next day. I do think google is spidering more efficiently now. how often a site is spidered depends upon their estimation of how often it changes. so if you have a high pr site you use to introduce new stuff then make sure you modify it regularly