An interesting development announced by Google.  More details about the sitemap XML file formats can be found here.

Hmm...I’m not real clear on this yet.  The 2-second analysis of their tool is that it’s geared towards sites with static HTML structures that are easily analyzed.

Yet Google uses a spider in their normal indexing, why not use a locally based spider here that would just follow links and not be concerned with directory structures, etc?

Many sites, including Boyink.com, are database-driven, meaning there’s no set of files stored on the server that a tool could analyize for a link structure.  The pages and links are generated as you move through the site.

If this is indeed the case, then I’ll be curious to see how quickly content management companies will code their tools to spit out this index file automatically.

For me, Google does a great job of indexing Boyink.com as is, so I’m not inclined to spend the additional time generating a map for the search engine to use.