Susan Mernit introduces RSS and compiles a good set of best-practices for media properties pursuing the RSS train in her article on Digital Edge:

RSS feeds come in many varieties, from full-text feeds that reproduce an entire article and sometimes even the photos to headline/digest feeds that provide the story headline along with the first 50 or so words of the story, or that offer just the headline alone (readers have to click back to the originating site to get the entire piece.) Readers can then pick up the feeds from either the article page (which carries a little XML/RSS tag), the publisher’s RSS page, (see CNN’s page ), or a site like My Yahoo or Bloglines, which offer content directories where readers can search for and select feeds. No matter what the process, the end result is that the headlines and digests of articles are viewed in the reader’s newsreader, a customized browser that downloads and displays RSS feeds.