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Up until just recently I always shot jpeg and its finest setting. The camera makes the basic adjustments for you and then you can try to work with adjusting that later. Jpeg is a compressed and pre-adjusted file. Raw is just the data which is captured by the sensor which means more information to work with. This translates to not only more image detail but also gives you more latitude if you are off on your exposure. That can mean more work between downloading your photos and being to do something with them like posting but how much work depends on how good the original image was. I find the image quality is a lot better.
The files are bigger too- I find I needed to get some bigger memory cards. A 2gb card I could get say 300- 400 images on now holds just about 200 so I ordered some new ones this week. Testing that on the camera the card says it has room for 260 images on jpeg fine and large while switching to NEF or Nikon's camera raw says the card will hold about 160 more images. Found a deal with rebate just a couple of days before it expired (a progressive rebate on SanDisc Extreme IIIs- the more you buy the bigger the rebate on each- up to $60 off on the three 4gb ones I bought for about $100 which knocks the price down to about $40 for all three!).
Going on a bit. I am just learning all about RAW too. Right now I am trying a demo version of Adobe Lightroom to handle my Raw images. It is great for reviewing and sorting them but I need to learn more about using it for further editing. But I still have Photoshop too which edits them just fine too. Nikon NX2 should do fine as well (haven't tried it).
Hope this is at least a little bit helpful!
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I add new pictures to my photo gallery pretty regularly. You can see them here if you are interested: http://www.pbase.com/jeffryz 
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