At the risk of dragging this out further and straying from the original post... but I don't think the OP will be back anyway
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The quality of content is left to humans to judge.
Who gives your site the best, as in most relevant, Backlinks? An automated spamming tool that hits random blogs run by 11 year olds about their Guinea Pigs or a site with genuinely relative and original content.
Back linking is important, there is no doubt and I won't argue that fact, but a hundred backlinks from pointless sites aren't worth 1 link from a serious, "qualified" site. You must know that surely?
Also, as I understand it, SE algo's DO analyse content for relavancy AND similarity. I've watched an interesting presentation given by Google about what they do with data... very clever and very interesting and it did give some insight into why some things work and others don't.
If you're making a living from what you do then good luck to you, but I'm not speaking without experience or knowledge here. I've had my successes too.
As I said, pinging should probably be included in any Blogging component produced for Joomla! beacuse it's a fashion, it's expected and the way to encourage more users is to give them what they know but with a slice of lemon. But it certainly is not a silver bullet as far as SEO is concerned. It will get your site crawled, but your site will be crawled anyway.
Case in point. I recently completed a very small site for a company here in the UK. A single link in to this site from my own was enough to get the whole thing spidered and indexed in Yahoo!, MSN and Google etc.
No pings, no blog posts (unless you count the one from my own site), no comment spam, no offline marketing either. It just happens, it's what spiders do. All the ping does is alert another page that there is something new on your blog. Nothing more.
Currently the site get's spidered every day. That will slow down as there is no regular new content being put up there, but that's the type of site it is. If I added a page each day, the spiders would continue to come each day.
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mmm, I would argue the ability to add lots of content very fast. A blog is a CMS really, as is Joomla.
The nail got hit on the head there. The power of blogs is that people who would previously have considered themsleves unable to have a website because they aren't "techy" enough now have websites... but they call them blogs. Because of this relative simplicity, there are more sites cross linking, normally to other blogs. That's the phenomenon and that is why blogs are successful. See, I'm not denying that blogs aren't a potentially useful marketing tool what I am saying is that pinging is largely irrelevant.
Have you done any tests with a new blog that doesn't ping anything. Just link to it from an already indexed site. See what happens. Providing the URLs are accessible (most are, SE's can cope with a few URL params) then your whole site should get indexed pretty fast. Once it's in there the spiders don't stop coming, they visit regularly checking for new content and reindexing as necessary. If you are posting new content regularly then I would argue that is why you gain ranking... SE's like new content as it makes a site look important.
It's not a biggie, if you want to ping, then ping away like there is no tomorrwo as it hurts no-one. But what you shouldn't do is attribute the effectiveness of a blog with the fact it pings other pages/blogs/services. You are getting good rank because you are posting new content.
Incidentally, the search query:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:armyofblogs.com is what I should have done, it was late and I'd been on a long conference call with a US client! Apologies!
Long post, apologies.
:-)
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Lazy? No... just really busy. I highly recommend opening a new thread. 
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