In response to my recent comments about ping economics at Verisign:

Slowing down “ping cycles” or otherwise degrading the performance of the service isn’t appealing to me at all. The goal is for all pings to circulate through the system quickly and accurately. Rather than thinking about changes in latency or timing, I’m thinking the “value-add” here will pivot around the depth or richness of the ping itself.

For example: if a blog submits a “full content ping” – a ping that is much more than just the URL notification of new post, but the full content of the post itself, the infrastructure layer, either as an extension of the ping server itself, or perhaps in conjunction with a partner, can skip the URL dereferencing and crawling process, provided it establishes nominal trust with the submitter. So, if the whole post is attached with the ping – including really useful metadata like that addressed in the Atom 1.0 spec – the post can be processed and indexed, and therefore surfaced to the user much more quickly, and cost effectively than the “basic ping”.

On the outbound side, if a service is offered that not only provides ping signals, but attaches a rich set of metadata along with it – tags, keywords, place names, geo-references, etc. – that would be a highly useful upgrade from the information provided right now, which is basically a title and a URL for the source content. That may be an area where service and application builders will find a fee for developing and delivering the needed metadata on pinged content is easily worth the fee charged by the service.

So, think about pings becoming more deep and rich as a way to add value that can be charged for, rather than “dumbing down”, or “slowing down” the existing basic pings so that what is now considered a basic ping can be monetized as a “premium”. That’s not what I'm talking about at all. That’s bad mojo, IMHO.

I agree. It is very bad mojo. But we still are going to wind up with a 'pro' version -- for extra cash -- with all the fancy bells and whistles (geolocation, etc.) and more 'pingwidth' than the basic stuff. (Yes, I did say 'pingwidth'. You heard it here first.)