Is Technorati making deals to get data first?

Actually, the story isn't behind a firewall. Try
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB112605609071333521-YJ_zDNeKEGDupVAyFZ96e1xw8tY_20060907,00.html?mod=rss_free

Blogging platforms are typically pinging blog.gs and weblogs.com (which are monitored by most search engines), and pingomatic (put together by Wordpress.com Matt Mullenwag) is used by an increased number of publishing tools and platforms to aggregate pings: ping pingomatic that will in turn ping all search engines, managed feed service providers, aggregators, etc.
So I am not sure what sort of edge Technorati would have in that instance compared to other blog search engines.
What is clear is that a generic search engine (Yahoo, Google,...) that does not monitor pings will not grab the posts as they become available. However we can all see in our logs Googlebot and Slurp visiting once to a few times per day. Blog posts now get indexed pretty quickly.

Speaking of Technorati, whatever became of the rumor last month that Technorati would be bought by a search engine "within a week"?

Dave'll probably comment because he's ubiquitous, but when I have a choice of what order to ping blog indexing sites, I put Technorati first. I'm not a blog empire, just some small blogs, but I know that they're the traffic leader, so I'd rather they were first in the list.

There's no way from the Journal piece to know whether it's a "ping Technorati and wait five minutes" or "ping Technorati then Feedster then..." deal.

not everyone's making deals...?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/zestyping/139157.html

I had some 50 blogs using wordpress mu, all gets content from articles rss feeds through rss2blog. But it seems technorati is not visiting my blogs after pinging. What could be wrong?
I saw somebody pings their blogspot blogs recklessly, every 5 minutes, and all are found in the ping blogs list of technorati. I'm completely confused, I thing he may be using some blackhat technique to ping technorati.