Under the category of what was someone thinking!
When I read this morning that since the introduction of WordPress version 2.8 that WordPress only Pings sites once and hour I just could not believe. Can you imagine having the hottest news story of the year and when you publish your post that WordPress can wait as much as an hour before it pings the variety of sites telling them you have new content to be indexed.
This change was introduced obviously by someone that does not have a clue on how the real world web works these days. So a word of warning if you have published a couple of articles in a row and have a big scoop to publish you better post the scoop first so that it pings the quickest or hope someone comes out with a simple patch.
Note: PowerPress users do not need to worry we ping iTunes separately so this bug does not affect the updating of your show on iTunes.
The ping feature in WordPress is worthless. I was unaware that it did not ping based on the blog post either. Say you write 2-3 blog posts in an hour, when it pings, the ping is going to use your latest blog post to ping with. I just looked at 2.6 and 2.7 source code, it appears to have the same behavior. Very disappointing.
I spent a lot of time developing the ping solution in the RawVoice Generator to make sure the specific posts are pinged. For the longest time I thought WordPress was doing it better that I did.