RSS feeds

What are rss feeds, and how are they helpful?
I am looking at the rss feed manager and am confused.

RSS feeds are a way to get content from other sites. They come as linked snippets of the original content from the site publishing the feed.

Most newspapers for instance have them available.

Oh, I thought it might have been the oppisite, where I sent out snippets of content.
Oh well.

You do. I should say you have it available for access by others if they want to use it. Like we have here: http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/external.php

Question...

Regarding RSS feeds, my blog homepage has been latched onto by two weird blogs that are nothing but other peoples blog posts. They are automated, when I make a new post on my blog they grab it and post it on their blog with a post like, Susy found this great post...

These are RSS feeds, correct?

I've been letting them do it because I assume that this doesn't hurt my site and that it could actually be helpful as by them doing this it creates to more links to my site floating around out there in cyberspace.

As long as they're linking back to you, the sites are fairly well on-topic, and there aren't too many sites doing it, it should be good for you.