installing rpms on FC3

[Raul A. Gallegos]

Hi.  Where can I read on this or can someone give me some quick 
pointers.  I'd like to install some additional software on this FC3 box 
such as CenterICQ and a bittorrent client.  These are not installed by 
default so my question is how do I go about getting rpm packages?  Is 
there an automated way of doing this or do I just download the rpms from 
the sites they are offered on and run some rpm install command?

Also, what is the advantage of installing rpms over just installing by 
hand such as:

./configure
make
make install

style of installations?

Thanks.