sitemaps in general

Thank everyone for their feedback/input however,unless this "sitemap"
thing becomes an "etched in stone" procedure for Google - I think I
will drop out of this beta program.

My results have disappeared from indexing and in fact I have lost all
ranking for both my sites.

The one site (by the way I switched to a free hosting service for this)
http://pcnetworkctr.netfirms.com has tons of inbound links from just
about everything you would be looking for. I think every page has been
crawled by Yahoo and listed as well.

My newer site http://www.network-support-solutions.com has done
miserably and I have even linked it back to the above site for max
exposure. This site I started just for some exposure as well as, (well
I haven't quite gotten there yet) but to attract installation style
business. So with the "lack-luster" of inbound links and what not I
subscribed to I think cj.com and brought in some outsource advertising.
Things that is someone stumbled across in a search (obviously not
Google) and realized that this is to be a commercial site more then a
site that provides commercial goods from others, they can click their
way out. I also created a links page that I'm not quite finished with
again more hopes. At this time that url doesn't jump out at you in any
web site navigation but it is there.

I guess all in all I'm throwing in the towel with this beta program. I
have created 2 sitemaps for the second site
network-support-solutions.com one .xml that includes the all so wanted
www. preface to each url (as suggested by Google) and another plain old
.txt file that does not include the www. prefix. Anyone want to guess
which one is actually being indexed?

Well all and all it was kind of a pain in the butt and I suppose the
bottom line is if you want decent exposure from Google plan on paying
for it (which is what I will be doing once I have finished my marketing
analysis......