Here's a RSS Primer geared toward publishers and content providers:

The main benefits of creating an RSS feeds include;

• RSS is an excellent and cost-effective way of driving traffic to, and increasing brand awareness of, any website that publishes content (e.g news, jobs, events) regularly. Once a publisher produces an RSS file, they are enabling others to syndicate their headlines, without any further work on their part.
• RSS is the dominant format for distributing headline content on the Web.
• RSS allows easy sharing of data between sites. Webmasters can use an RSS file to easily incorporate third party content into their own site.
• Content from RSS feeds can be easily repurposed allowing, for example, cross searching of a number of different feeds at once.
• RSS content can be added to personal desktop news reading applications like Feedreader or AmphetaDesk

It also offers a good summary of key points about RSS:

• The use of RSS benefits everyone involved - for publishers and content providers details of new content can be accessed by a much broader audience, for web site producers new content can be easily integrated into web sites or portals, and for end users easy access to new content is greatly facilitated.
• An RSS file (also known as an RSS feed or RSS channel) consists of a list of items, each of which contains a title, description and a link to a web page. Typically the full content itself is made available separately and can be accessed by the link in the RSS file.
• Utilising an RSS feed is straightforward. Once an RSS file is made available on a web site, interested parties can simply gather the file from the site and reuse the content in a variety of ways.
• There are a number of different versions of RSS. Although this has led to some confusion and debate it is not a major issue as almost all RSS applications can handle any RSS version.
• RSS can stand for 'Rich Site Summary', 'RDF Site Summary' or 'Really Simple Syndication' depending on who you ask and which version they are speaking about.
• RSS is an XML based format. If you already know a bit about HTML and XML then RSS will be a breeze!

...via The Shifted Librarian