A couple of weeks ago, a friend recommended that I check out Pandora Radio. Needless to say, being an avid NPR listener who rarely listens to commercial radio stations, I let the e-mail sit for several days.

In an effort to clean out my inbox, I clicked on the link to Pandora Radio for a quick courtesy peek. When you first go to the site, it looks simple enough. Type in the name of one of your favorite bands or artists, and it streams a song right then and there on your computer with no plug-ins or downloads necessary. OK. I was interested enough to investigate further, so I clicked on the About Pandora link to read more.

Pandora has a "single mission: To play music you'll love - and nothing else." Great, sounds good. What else? It's part of the Music Genome Project, which started in 2000 as "the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken." Wow, that's impressive, but what does it mean to me? Well, here's what they have to say:

Alright, this could be cool. Basically, once I plug in a few bands, they will know what I like better than I do, which is exactly what my experience has been.

The way it works, in practical terms, is that you type in a few artists to frame a channel. Then, Pandora analyzes its huge database of songs that are categorized by lots of different criteria to find which songs match the combined criteria of the songs you input. It's kind of like the algorithm used to determine the delegate count in Texas (sorry, I couldn't resist throwing in a political reference).

Once a channel is created, you sit back and listen. Or, you can make the channel even 'smarter' for you by voting songs up or down. You can also tell them that you like a song but don't want to listen to it for a month. If you really like a particular song, then you can tell them to play it more often, similar to normal radio stations that play the same songs over and over again every hour.

Pandora has advertising on the site, but no ads are broadcast on the channels. I kept a separate browser window open with it playing non-stop without interruptions, other than the ones I caused by voting things down. Let me warn you up front, if you have an addictive personality or obsessive tendencies, you may not want to play it all of the time - it's like a really cool video game!

Pandora Radio is the smartest radio I've ever encountered. I doubt if it will replace NPR for me, but I did add it to My Favorites. I'll probably listen to it while playing around on the Internet or finding a way to distract myself from the depressing events of the Democratic primaries or national economy.