Basic questions on RSS

[astoller]

I struggle to understand the value of RSS
Can anyone explain the following:

If we all use a particular RSS feed then we all have duplicate content.
So why use them and run the risk of being penalised?

Of what value is duplicate content to Google?
If they want rss feeds then they can go directly to the publisher of the rss feed.Why would they want to crawl 3rd party sites holding the same feed and the same text ?

Is a url ending in atom.xml a newsfeed?

[cbp]

Its probably won't be duplicate content unless the whole page is teh same. The RSS feed will only be on part of the page.

CBP