In essence, it's an easy way to distribute your posts. I think if you would do these wonderful Shakespeare quotes daily on a Blogspot.com blog (or something similar), anyone with an RSS reader like
Google Reader could see them through the reader instead of sifting through the threads at DU to find it.
I'm certainly not suggesting you do that instead of posting them here at DU--rather, I hope you'll do that in addition.From Wikipedia:
RSS is a family of web feed formats specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats) and used for Web syndication. RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel". These RSS feeds provide a way for users to passively receive newly released content (such as text, web pages, sound files, or other media); this might be the full content itself or just a link to it, possibly with a summary or other metadata (data describing the content).
In the typical use scenario, a content provider publishes a feed link on their site which end-users can add to an aggregator program running on their machine; periodically (typically every 5-10 minutes, though most aggregators make this user-configurable), the aggregator asks all the servers in its feed list if they have new content; if so, the aggregator either makes a note of the new content or downloads it.
Compared to websites, feeds have a few advantages for the user experience:
* Users can be notified of new content without having to actively check for it.
* The information presented to users in an aggregator is typically much simpler than most websites. This spares users the mental effort of navigating complex web pages, which can be a demanding, attention-focusing task when trying to accomplish other work.
* Media files can be automatically downloaded without user intervention.
RSS feeds are operated by many news web sites, weblogs, schools, and podcasters.
For the full article go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29