Pinging, does it help at all?

Does pinging blogs help with producing backlinks to my site at all? I'm assuming none or very little

By pinging do you really mean opening a command prompt window and typing:
ping yourfavoriteblog.blogspot.com
(or something similar)?

I can see NO benefit for doing that, and it wouldn't generate any backlinks either.

Or do you mean "pinging" in some other way?

Pinging using the services like pingoat will add your site to the specified websites like technorati.com.

Pinging is a big help for everyone who updates their blog continually.

Ahh.... not standard "pinging"... new term relating to blogging. (sorry - I haven't played much w/ blogging yet.)

Here's the description from pingoat:

What in the world is Pingoat! ?
Pingoat is a service that pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog's popularity.

Pinging your blog is really a great help.