I used to use Pingomatic but yeah after about six or eight services it just... stops.
I go with Pingoat and KPing now.
I keep the boxes for Technorati, Yahoo and Feedburner & WeBlogALot (and Blogrolling when I remember) unchecked because they ping your RSS instead of your URI, and it seems to work faster to ping them as a single xml feed check...
I bookmark the lot and stick'em in a bookmark folder, and as soon as I publish I right-click "Open as Tab Group".
Seems to work
Oh and I also use these guys:
http://www.adultblogindex.com/add.php
and bookmark the result...
Thanks for the Pingates ref!