tell me about RSS

I feel I need to know a little about RSS since it seems integral to the sharing of blogs and blog posts. Also the updates page/s of the wiki can be syndicated using RSS feeds.

I am greatly encouraged by this comment:

"The strength of RSS is its simplicity. It is exceptionally easy to syndicate website content using RSS."
[Stephen Downes: An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers]

Bullet points about RSS, and RSS feeds:

• RSS stands for 'really simple syndication'
  
• type of XML document used to share news headlines and other types of web content
  
• content developers make their RSS files available by placing them on their web server
  
• RSS aggregators are able to read the RSS files and collect data about the website
  
• aggregators place the site information into a larger database
  
• database allows for structured searches of a large number of content providers
  
• RSS is the first working example of an XML data network
  
• RSS is not centralized, it is distributed... one item at a time
  
• there is no central store, repository or library of RSS content; it is all over the internet.
  
• to access and use RSS content in a viewer or in a web page you need a simple RSS reader