If I understand Dave Winer's ramblings correctly, he has sold weblogs.com and other infrastructure to Verisign (yes, confirmation from Verisign).
Which makes weblogs.com completely dead and uninteresting to me, because everything Verisign touches turns to shit. Not to mention I don't trust the company as far as I can spit - they have their dirty fingers in too many internet topics (and are all too concerned about expanding their already absurd monopoly in some areas).
Well, today you ping via Ping-O-Matic anyway - this way pings also go out much broader, also to more sensible services. Apart from that, weblogs.com was already pretty unusable because it simply lacked the necessary performance. Which is no wonder if you choose the wrong software base for such services (nothing against Frontier, but it's simply unusable for this).