I still use ’em, though my theme(s) seem to have a sitemap page, that autogenerates/updates, with each post.

From what I’ve been reading, sitemaps still count when it comes to getting indexed better, but most importantly to me – how you want to be indexed. As far as whether they’re completely necessary or not, who knows. We never get the straight-up goods from Google anyway. I think it more than likely helps a site get indexed faster with more urls in the SERPs. But again, who knows. Not everything we read on the net is gospel.

For my sites that aren’t powered with WP I use xml-sitemaps.com. The free version allows up to 500 urls. I don’t know if I’ll ever want to index more than that, but if so the upgrades are pretty cheap with that application. A friend of mine uses the paid version and it’s a pretty cool program. With a lot of option control.

For WP powered sites I use either the XML Sitemap plugin or Yoast. I’ve been experimenting with a Yoast sitemap, being a bit more choosy on what goes into the file. The results have been interesting. WP is renowned for creating a lot of duplicate content on a blog, so I believe spending more time on a sitemap when running a WP blog is a good idea. Then again I’m partially OCD, so keep that in mind.