RSS Help?

Hi,

Please can someone explain to me what RSS is?

Does anyone here use RSS and how do you start one on your site?

What are the benifits of using RSS?

What are the disadvantges of using RSS?

Can RSS help to obtain more traffic to your site, and if so what is the best way of going about it?

If anyone could answer these questions or share your experiances with me, I would be entirely grateful

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news.

Example for the usage of RSS.
Bidera Auctions ( http://www.bidera.com/auction_help/...t_help_feed.htm ). The site provides (RSS) information about the category item's in.

What are the benifits of using RSS?
Taking Bidera Auctions as a sample
- Webmasters can use these feeds to add auctions headlines to site pages,
- view a auctions search in any rss reader, with all the functionality RSS client provides;
- read auctions posts on a small device, even a cellfone (using rss-wml);
- possibly the most useful: be notified of new items that match your search, by using a ‘differential' rss client, like rss2email.

If you have a company, and your company has things it wants people to know about (like sales, campaigns, new products, etc.) then your company needs an RSS feed. Let them come to you.