RSS feeds

Hi,
I am have read about RSS feeds, but I can't understand what they are, or why I need them. Can anyone shed some light on the topic?

Like... who reads RSS feeds? how do they get the content? How do RSS feeds get out to the public? If someone "subscribes" to a feed, what happens? etc...

thanks in advance!

The easiest way to look at it would be from a user's point of view. If you use the My Yahoo! service, then you could have one web page that allows you track the latest news headlines from several news websites via RSS. The news site publishes an RSS feed and the latest headlines and a snippet and a link to the article appear in the RSS feed. Every time you open up you My Yahoo! portal page it pulls up the latest headlines.

Now, think of it from the website owner's point of view. If you've got a news site or a blog then you can provide an RSS feed of your content. Visitors can see your latest headlines and they will click on the link and come back to your site if they see a headline they're interested in.

RSS feeds can appear on another website and don't have to appear on just personal portals like My Yahoo!. If you're a website owner and have a site about Widgets then wouldn't it be great to have the latest headlines about Widgets on your home page so your visitors can see the latest headlines? Maybe they might come back to your site every day to see the headlines insted of going to the source itself and having to weed through all the news.

As a website owner, pulling in the latest headlines on your site's topic will keep your site "fresh". And if you can publish an RSS feed of your content, links to your site could show up on other people's sites. That's a great way to get links that aren't reciprocal links!

As usual, thanks BHartzer...