I am curious if I link to a new website from a blog, will it be indexed in google faster because of the whole blog/ping thing?
my experience of past years clearly YES IF it is a highly active old blog - high PR and submitted its RSS feed to all major RSS directories then it normally takes even for a brand new site only hours or days to be fully indexed and for your own OTHER pages hours or pages on OTHER established sites of course you would need to PING the RSS directories after each new article published! if unfamiliar with RSS and proper submission - you may have a look at the RSS howto
I think it doesn't matter if it's a website or blog. As long as both of them are highly active and have a nice PR, you'll get the same results.
this only is true IF you have an RSS feed for your overall site as well - then announce on a new page that page/site and have an RSS feed opdated from your site submitted to RSS directories which are regularly pinged. it is the multiple/instant occurrence on 50+ RSS directories - most having high PR - that makes the essential difference vs a single old site to promote new pages or sites! if 50+ old high PR sites ( RSS directories ) show a NEW page/site - that apparently is far more efficient than if a single site publishes a link.
High PR sites don't necessarily get crawled quickly. If they're relatively old and static the googlebot might not visit as often. The googlebot seems to visit blogspot blogs several times a day. A little bit of home cooking never hurts. And getting something onto the big social sites like Digg will definitely get you a visit. You should also remember to ping your backlinks: http://promote-my-site.com/index.php/139-All-Your-Links-are-Ping-Worthy.html Building up authority on Technorati will help with getting indexed as well.
The speed of indexing only depends on how quickly it will take Google to find your link. If you drop your link on a busy site that get crawled all the time, expect to get indexed the same day. PR makes no difference. There is a reason why Google crawls certain sites more than others. Its simply catching up with frequently updated content. Also just because its a blog it does not mean it has RSS and even if it does; it does not mean that the RSS is in use.