i wish dan gillmor's new moveable type-driven weblog pinged blo.gs directly. it's one of those blogs that weblogs.com frequently gets spurious updates for. i suspect dave's weblogsComHelper tool, which appears to be the source of many spurious updates on weblogs.com. i can understand why he made the tool (blo.gs does some polling for the same reason), i just wish it were better.

it does make me think that the ping interface should perhaps have a flag that people could pass in that said “hey, i'm not really the owner of this blog, but i think it was updated” so that the service could take that into account when deciding if the site was really updated. in the case of blo.gs, i'd probably apply the three-day rule in ignoring such unofficial pings for sites that had previously pinged “officially”.