Fortunately, someone has written up a nice little How-To... so i don't need to type very much. Here is the solution as presented by Tom Gidden:

Removing Ping from iTunes 10.0.1

In a nutshell...

defaults write com.apple.iTunes disablePingSidebar 1
defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown 1
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-link-arrows 1
defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks 1

...but do read the full article for the nitty-gritty.

[edit: personally, the last 3 were all i cared about.]

Thanks for that link, Hal. Just came across this little applet: NoPing. It toggles visibility of the Ping button and sidebar entry On or OFF, but also affects the sidebar's Store entry item.

It removes the iTunes Store from the sidebar, and with it the Ping thing, which can also be accomplished in the iTunes preference > Parental.

My reading of stuff here and there is that some users, including me, would like to dump the Ping thing but keep the iTunes Store in the left sidebar.

So in Hal's original post (first above), would doing the first two commands but not the last two remove Ping but keep the iTunes Store?

NoPing App does not work for PPC using Leopard.

I just tried those four lines, with itunes quit, and relaunched itunes. (10.1.1) the ping sidebar persists....

:shrug:
They musta changed something then.
Can't it be disabled in the prefs now?

{at this point, i don't even know what a "ping sidebar" is.}

OS 10.5.8 itunes 10.1.1
I used that applet to remove ping and it works.
The itunes sidebar remains.

jaybass

Parental controls allow you to keep the Store, and lose Ping.

Roger,

You're gonna have to give more details on how this works.....I just opened the Parental Controls PrefPane in System Preferences and it doesn't look like there is an intuitive path to your assertion.

Or does Roger mean iTunes > Prefs > Parental?

(Running iTunes 8.21, so can't check.)

That seems likely: iTunes 10 has a checkbox under Prefs > Parental to turn off Ping.

yes, Artie and alternaut are correct. the Prefs in iTunes allow you to turn off Ping.

and further, as I read back through the thread and check dates, Dermot mentioned this way back in September.

Yet another option: I just noticed that yesterday’s Macpilot 4.1.8 update includes functions to hide the Ping dropdown and disable the Ping sidebar in iTunes.

(Disclaimer: I own a copy of MacPilot, but have no other connection with Koingo Software.)

It seems that the current version of OnyX (freeware) can also remove "Ping buttons" (that's how it is labeled in OnyX).