Please Advise -- My Blog Articles are Being Linked to But I'm Not Sure if it's a Good Thing??

I posted an article on my blog a few hours ago. I was looking at my site's incoming links on google and I came across a website that basically copied my title and the first 78 words of my article, and then has a link underneath to my site that says: "Follow this Link". The anchor text is the article title and my site name.

Technically I don't feel as if they are stealing my content as they are linking the reader back to my site -- but it feels a little strange because they are using my title and they do have space on their site for comments about my article.

I think that I should be happy that my article is being picked up, but it just seems strange to me because it was picked up so quickly -- especially because it happened to another one of my posts a few days ago. It was a different website that was linking to me, but the whole "excerpt and link" thing was the same.

So...

1. Is this a good thing for me-- is this a quality link?
2. How does this site know so quickly that I've published a new article? Do they have some kind of bot that does this?
3. What makes them select one of my articles over any other?

Thanks. Any advice is much appreciated.