Radio Customized for You— (NYT) Pandora, Last.fm and Slacker keep track of your musical tastes, then customize programming for you. They throw in new material you might like. “They all do it by harnessing the technological forces of social networking, data mining and music analysis, though each uses a slightly different technique.” CIQ: Sounds like a lot less work than composing your own playlist.

Young Adult Books for Adults— (WSJ) Publishers love the fact that the YA audience is hot– sales up in a large flat market, with targets easy to reach online in places like MySpace. And yet, books written in teen voices (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and upcoming I Love You Beth Cooper) are being marketed to adults. CIQ: We’re interested in publishers doing more to reach adults online. Too few have serious online marketing efforts, though they say they do.

SecondLife Not Alone— (Business Week)  MapleStory and KartRider are more two dimensional role playing games. Users say they are for non-techies. The games are given away for free, but make money because users pay for clothes and accoutrements for their avatars. CIQ: In February at MapleStory, users spent $1.2 million on 600,000 avatar-enhancing items. We wonder how long it will take brands to product avatar items.