insert rss feeds from other sites on my blog sidebar

I’m new to blogging and setting up wordpress. I’ve installed
wp 2.0 here: https://www.zeroexp.com/zeroexpwp

and it’s working and I’ve been able to do most everything I’ve tried so far very easily. I’m just a little confused about how to add feeds to my blog.

I want to add news feeds in my sidebar of my blog (or elsewhere on my site) from other sites for example flickr or any other places that say “subscribe to this rss feed” and post them in the sidebar of the blog. (I used the flickr badge without a problem, but I’m wanting to have the most recent comment come up from someone else’s blog on my site, for example…or yahoo groups)

Do I need to install a wordpress plugin to do this?

I’ve tried getting the link for the rss feed from (again, using flickr as an example) and adding it in the Dashboard to Links, advanced, RSS URI and it creates a link in the sidebar, but not to a valid location (I get an error and it’s not pulling content, just making a link)…

Everything I seem to be reading talks more about how to make my own blog available as rss, but not about how to have my blog display the feeds of other sites on my site.

I was able to use dashboard to import an rss feed I had saved as a file directly into my site (creating comment entries from each post on the other site), but I’m wanting this to be automated and post in the sidebar…

I’ve read the intro to RSS and all files through the WordPress help files, but this still isn’t very clear to me. It reads as if WP2.0 will handle the feeds automatically…but the more I’m reading the more it seems as if I need a plug-in for this.

if so, could anyone recommend one that is fairly easy to work with this version of 2.0 for someone who’s fairly literate at editing scripts and so on? I’m just a bit confused which direction to get started in.

Thanks so much for your help.

Margaret Warren