Here's another little known feature about the sitemaps protocol, you can actually ping search engines and crawlers to tell them about your sitemap, or to tell them that it has changed.

It appears that Google has expanded on the stats that they offer to webmasters. The stats were previously available only to those with a sitemap defined, but now you can access them just by telling them your url, and verifying.

They also provide more stats than they did a few months ago.