Want to know which blogs are tops, go to Technorati. For social networking sites have a friend submit some content from your site to http://www.digg.com, http://www.reddit.com, http://www.netscape.com, and http://www.stumbleupon.com.
Then find some directories to submit to, http://www.seomoz.org has some good articles on the subject.
If you write a press release submit it to http://www.prleap.com, seth godin listed in the 8 free things every site should do.
http://www.squidoo.com/topfreethings/
Follow these strategies and your content will get in the search engines index quickly.
I haven't submitted the page to news.YC because it is german only, and not very tech cool: http://Mondhandy.de is about an astrological moon calendar for cell phones I developed some time ago...
Edit: I don't think the moon calendar is very popular outside of Germany, however, I might be mistaken, and if anybody is interested in marketing it in the US, I would of course welcome a contact.
How to sell it - I am not sure yet. I was planning to try advertising in women's magazines (online edition), also I guess find all the astrology communities and write about it there. I am new to selling...
The mobile application gets "distributed" through a publisher, which unfortunately limits me a bit in my marketing efforts. I would have liked to try selling through Amazon, for example (so that people looking for print editions of moon calendars stumble upon the mobile application). But it is too complicated for the time being (distributor can't provide the API I would need). If there is any interest for the application, I might still pursue it at a later stage, though.
I was hoping that there could be other ways to sell a mobile application, though.
Just looked at your homepage, I am impressed by the number of Open Source projects you have done...
Just wait, optimize keywords in page, create backlinks and you will get nice pagerank as a bonus.
You could use this tool from time to time: http://www.void.be/googletool.html
Google tries to get news items into the index quickly, but that doesn't mean they are doing it from newly discovered sites. Part of the reason they crawl sites frequently is that the site has new content every time the crawler visits. I'm sure it also doesn't help if the site has something other than a baseline pagerank.
Also keep in mind that at some point in the past year or two, Google appeared to give better pagerank to sites on domains whose registration was paid up more than a year in advance.