So the pings to central directories have been running in their own background thread from the very beginning at Python Desktop Server. This is definitely recommended for http://weblogs.com and http://blo.gs. I'll continue pinging there, not because I think weblogs.com itself is important - but the changes.xml from there is used by various services as a control file to, for example, pull the RSS feed into the database at http://feedster.com/. The original article is at Der Schockwellenreiter here.