O'Reilly's XML.com site has just published an article on "What is RSS?" by Mark Pilgrim. Well worth a read.
With all the blog activity here, it might be easy for people not to notice the recent comment on Jim Vitkus' RDF resources post by "burningbird."
While she will probably hate my drawing attention to her, you should know that "burningbird" is the alias for Shelley Powers, who is in the process of completing a book called Practical RDF for O'Reilly, and who's been intimately involved in the RDF standards process. Her weblog is a treat to read, too, with a lovely mixture of technical and personal material. And her comments sections tend to read like a "who's who" in the XML/RDF world, serving in many cases like an informal message board for XML experts.
This article gives reasons to use RDF. It also gives a short history of RDF. In addition, it explains why both users and publishers will want to use it.
This article gives a quick tutorial about RSS. It also answers some questions like, "But isn't it giving away my content?"
What's RDF good for? This article tells you. It also has plenty of links to other RSS/RDF resources. The author of this article also critiques Make your XML RDF-Friendly (an article JiaM already mentioned), pointing out what he thinks are valid points, and what aren't.
This article talks about how Netscape uses RSS in a "multi-feed sidebar tab", and gives examples of how it is used.
Here is an RSS Channel Editor from Webreference.com: http://www.webreference.com/cgi-bin/perl/rssedit.pl. I think this is an extremely handy tool since you put information into the form, and it automatically builds the RSS for you... so you don't have to write the XML yourself. The only problem is, it still builds the RSS in version 0.91... I was wondering if anyone knows of a similar tool that builds the RSS in v 1.0?
What's cooler about this channel editor is that you can use the "Fetch" button to retrieve an existing RSS file and edit it in any way you please.
I was looking up RDF information on Google and retrieved this article from XML.com. It lists eight descriptive steps for "keeping RDF concerns in mind" when you create XML document types, thus raising the flexibility of your documents by making them ready for RDF applications.