How do you get your posts to be seen?  WordPress has a feature which automatically notifies sites when you publish a new post.  You can specify sites by going to the Options -> Writing admin page, which by default lists http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. I found an article written by someone who did a little bit of research:  WordPress [...]

I noticed a phenomenon on this blog pretty early on where any references one post would make to another would cause a comment to be created on the referenced post from the referring post.  I didn’t know it at the time, but this is called a ping.  I suspect the immediate source of the term [...]