(1) An Internet service that pings computers on a regular basis to determine if they are still running. For example, a ping service would be used with a server farm to determine if any of the servers have failed. See ping.

(2) A service on the Internet that receives notifications (pings) from blogs that there is a new post. All subscribers signed up for that blog are notified that an update has been made. Ping servers on the Internet, such as VeriSign's Weblogs.com (www.weblogs.com), provide the service at no charge.