Thanks for the info! I wonder if "we don't want to implement it the same way LiveJournal did" means they would be open to my Dreamwidth Alert idea. Basically, with Google Alert, G sends a digest each day of any new backlinks to your chosen search term (which can be any word or phrase at all - I've actually been getting alerts on a string of letters - complete nonsense - for a while now just to test what comes back on it). Alerts would mean a lot more trawling of the servers then a mere pingback, which seems fairly simple and low churn on the servers in comparison.