MADISON AVENUE is giving a new spin to ''I Spy,'' the children's game, by chanting, ''I spy, with my little eye, a little 'i.' ''

Just about anywhere consumers look, they will find products, brands and other commercial offerings that begin with a lowercase ''i,'' inspired by popular technology names like iMac, iPhone, iPod and iVillage.

A contest sponsored by the Friendly's restaurant chain, for instance, is called iScream. A television show that made its debut Tuesday night on ABC is titled ''i-Caught.''

Other examples include iWireless, a line of prepaid cellphones available at Kroger supermarkets; iCare, a brand of liquid hand sanitizers; iBoxer, underwear with pockets for MP3 players, sold by the Play division of Intimo; and i-Report, video clips contributed by viewers of CNN and visitors to the cnn.com Web site.

''It's a nice strategy for borrowing some equity'' from the better-known i-brands, said Michael Cucka, a partner at Group 1066, a consulting company in New York specializing in corporate identity and branding.

''It seems to work because you're associating yourself with the idea of trying to be cool,'' he added.

''But when you start to do what everyone is doing, you start to lose the power of borrowing that equity,'' Mr. Cucka said. ''And perhaps the more people who do it, the less cool it becomes.''

Riding the coattails of a trend is nothing new for marketers. During the dot-com boom, for example, a proliferation of brand names began with ''e's'' (to suggest e-commerce or anything online) and ''u's'' (to flatter the consumer by insinuating that the product or service was created specifically for ''u'').

The capital ''I'' has been ensconced for decades in the popular culture, as evidenced by novels like ''I Claudius,'' ''I, Robot'' and ''I, the Jury'' as well as TV series like ''I Love Lucy'' and ''I Spy.''

The small-''i'' trend seems to have begun in earnest with the arrivals in 1995 of iVillage.com, a Web site aimed at women, and in 1996 of the iMac computer from Apple.

''I guess I could say, 'Ay, ay, ay,' but flattery is a beautiful thing,'' said Deborah I. Fine, president at iVillage Properties in New York, part of the NBC Universal division of General Electric, who took pains to assure a reporter that her middle initial really is ''I.''

Rather than play down the ''i'' in iVillage.com because of all the echoing, Ms. Fine said, the identity is being emphasized in a campaign being created in a collaboration between iVillage executives and Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners in New York, part of MDC Partners. The ads place a small ''i'' in front of a series of words like ''fashion,'' ''gossip,'' ''health'' and ''humor.''

''It's our heritage,'' Ms. Fine said. ''Why would we walk away from it?'' In the spirit of the campaign, she had this to say about the look-alike names: ''I original. I flattered. I did this a decade ago.''

The boom in i-names appears to have accelerated since 2001, when Apple brought out the iPod.

Intimo started selling the Play iBoxer in 2005. And CNN, part of Time Warner, asked the public a year ago to start sharing video clips with the network and its Web site under the ''i-Report'' rubric. Since then, there have been more than 47,000 consumer-generated submissions from more than 40 countries.

''For us, the 'i' is less connected to all the Internet references but rather is about the much more personal connection'' to viewers, said Susan M. Bunda, executive vice president for content development and strategy at CNN in Atlanta.

As for the name, Ms. Bunda recalled: ''We were working on the idea of user-generated material for a while. I just kept thinking about using the words 'user-generated' or 'citizen journalism,' but people don't think that way. People just think, 'I report' -- and that clicked.''