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I was all excited about the sitemaps standard when I first heard about it.  The catch is, it's not clear when everyone will support it.  This URL indicates that the following URL-template:

<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

is used to ping the various search engines to let them know that a sitemap is present, or updated in the sitemaps standard.  I've attempted the following requests (Google's works — http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=www.domain.com/sitemap.xml):

According to the spec, something like these should work for the other SEs: 

yahoo.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
siteexplorer.yahoo.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url (guess?)
search.msn.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

None of them work.  I can't find a specification for what the URLs will be.  So when will it be implemented?  I sit here with my chapter on sitemaps and wonder what I should cover.  My coauthor and I have decided to leave the chapter as-is, but note that this standard is upcoming, and looking, for the most part, like the Google standard.

Update: John Mu pointed out that the Yahoo sitemap ping address looks like this: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&amp;url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml.  I stand corrected — thanks John, but so much for "standards" :)  MSN does not have the functionality implemented at all, apparently.

Jeez, you'd think with all their cool .NET libraries (and their stated emphasis on search) they could deploy something like this quickly.