Basically, you have code that displays the links in your feed which are probably the latest articles on your site. So that way when you update your site, the latest links appear in all the places where your feed is being displayed.

and what about those rss pings and submitting to rss aggregators?

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lol but seriously RSS feeds help your links and pages get indexed faster

I'm a bit new to the whole RSS thing, would anyone know where i could find some good basic information on the actual workings of RSS and does it work better than manually bookmarking your site?

so if you ping bunch of rss sites with your feed urls, they re-spider your feed and do what with it?
Or they make google re-spider it? uh