I think Google pays close attention to anything with a feed (maybe "Anything Google Reader users have subscribed to", since they're necessarily processing the data anyway?). Whenever I post to my own blog, not particularly notable in an absolute sense, the post shows up nearly instantly in Google Alerts.
Yes, especially as soon as one person has added the feed to Google Reader, the bot stops by a few times a day. I imagine, the more often updates occur, and the more people are waiting for the feed on Google Reader, the more often the bot will stop for a coffee here.
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.