Think of RSS as a delivery service saving you the time and effort of visiting various sites to see if there's anything new. Feeds are like a mailman who delivers newspapers and magazines so you don't have to go out and buy/look for them every day. Think of the time you save because of your mailman, now think how much you could save by subscribing to a feed and let the publisher of a website deliver the news to you.
And unlike email subscriptions there is absolutely no possibility of spam mail or unwanted virus attacks since you are in full control of the content being delivered to you. You cannot unsubscribe spam mail, you can unsubscribe a feed.
I have roughly 200-250 feeds in my aggregator (possibly even more). Everything from general news to specialist news (scuba, photography, advertising, design etc.) and interesting personal blogs. Some people automatically associate RSS feeds with personal blogs but the concept goes waay beyond that single purpose. It can be used for any content that is updated regularly (or not).
I have a feed that tells me when someone commented on a photo in my gallery or a blog post or a forum post or when someone edited a group project at work/class... whatever basically.
I've set up a feed for a small business website where hardly anything changes over time. But I've put it there anyway in case someone wants to be notified when it does.
The point is - I don't have to search for new content, the content comes to me and all those feeds take me just 15min to browse every day. Compared to how many hours/days if I'd visit each site individually??
to Michael
Nobody is saying you should start writing a personal blog. I don't think anyone cares what you ate for breakfast. Everything stays the same as it is and to be honest - what you're doing now could, in a way, be identified as a blog. There are many different types of blogs out there. What differentiates yours from other more common types are just optional technicalities (blog engine, feed, permalinks, comments).
There's absolutely no need for you to change your style of writing just because there's a feed and/or blog engine present. Even if you decide to edit/publish a feed by hand... this is all you'd have to copy/paste each time you update. That tool I linked to earlier would simply do the "coding" work for you
<item>
<title>L-L now has an RSS feed!!!</title>
<link>http://www.luminous-landscape.com/new/index.shtml</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 20 Nov 2005 18:46:53 +0000</pubDate>
<author>Michael</author>
<description>
With winter coming on, at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere... it is the time when site updates happen and I decided to start a feed! :P
</description>
</item>
I also don't understand why you're affraid of losing visitors because of a feed? Several studies and real world examples show that a feed actually acts the other way around. It generates more traffic, attracts more visitors. I could do a search for you but not today, I'm about to fall asleep any second.
People would still visit you website to catch up on the forums and/or read the new essays, reviews etc. It would act the same way as the "what's new" page does. If you don't care, you don't read it. If you do, you click on the link.
Enough for now but I'll be happy to answer any other questions.