Interesting. It is hard to find information in a usable format. Can you give us all a useful link?
What is it when you breed a male and female seeds from the same plant then?
say you have NL, you generally dont know how many times its been crossed with itself... so it could be an F29 or F234..... say it was a F29 when the plant got to you, then you breed a male to a female you than make F30 seeds....
the more times you cross it with itself the more stable the gene pool becomes, thusly the seeds you plant will be more uniform.
but if you cross, say lowrider with a purple haze(a sativa) you produce F1 seeds.... since these strains are SOOO different the seeds will greatly vary from one seed to the other.... one seed might be autoflowering, another might look more sativa, and another might look somewhat inbetween.
now say you find a plant that you like and want to make some seeds in its image because it was autoflowering and had some nice purple haze attributes to it also. what you do is back cross it with another plant that looks similar to it and make seeds. you keep cuttings of the mom and use these cuttings to keep pollinating with a male plant from her offspring.... so now you are taking a male plant from her seeds and keep pollinating her, and so on and so forth.... each time its genetics resemble the mother plant more and more.... this is know as IBL or stabilizing the strain...
ummm ya, maybe ill find another link to better explain..
i was actually looking for a different breeding link that was pretty useful, but i guess i never bookmarked it
anyways
GROWFAQ
i think they help support big branches. i think if you see fat rings you can assume fat buds. 
just my assumption. 
