Automattic, the company that runs the popular Wordpress blogging software, has acquired the Blo.gs pinging and blog trackback technology from Yahoo.

Services like Blo.gs give bloggers a way to quickly to “ping,” or alert search engines and RSS readers when their new content gets posted. Especially for competitive news blogs like us at VentureBeat, speed is necessity, because we can sometimes break a story, but we may not be credited with it if we don’t get the word out quickly enough.

Financial details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg blogs about the deal, saying he was inspired by Blo.gs to produce the early Wordpress feature that reordered your blogroll based on update times. CEO Toni Schneider also blogged about the deal, saying Yahoo was “refreshingly quick” in doing the deal.

Yahoo bought blo.gs in 2005. It competes with other ping services such as Ping-o-Matic and Google.