Anyone who builds a Web site can incorporate Web feeds. If it lives on the Web, it can be brought to your desktop - or to your wireless device, for that matter.

Human Rights Watch keeps activists current with feeds sorted by region. The U.S. Geological Survey's feeds let seismologists immediately know where the world is shaking.

The U.S. Product Safety Commission just began providing recall notices via RSS. General Motors offers feeds on topics including safety and automotive tech. And a growing number of companies use feeds to disseminate info internally.

"If you're not reading it in RSS you're wasting your time," declaimed Microsoft's blogging evangelist, Robert Scoble, who says he subscribes to nearly 1,300 feeds.

RSS has been called the TiVo of the Web, the first "killer app" of the anticipated automation of social and commercial transactions online using the Web's second-generation XML (extensible markup language) standard.

Alas, you'll not find the tools for handling RSS in your Microsoft Windows operating system. Not yet, anyway.

You've got to go out and get them, just like you had to download Netscape or one of its competitors in 1994 when you wanted a Web browser.

But the writing is on the wall. And it's not graffiti; the feeds are spam-free - though advertising may be pumped through some eventually.

Yahoo and Google recently embraced Web feeds, and Microsoft is expected to incorporate tools for managing them in its next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn.

Yahoo's new search engine trolls through RSS feeds in addition to Web pages. And a five-person company called Feedster.com is trying to build a business around customizing searches of 500,000 feeds - and then delivering you the search results in a single feed.