The Readalike Conundrum: What Netflix Can Tell us About Predicting Predilections

Fond as I am of podcasts, I do have a tendency to view them as conveyance systems for blog fodder. I plug in my earphones, walk home from work, and get ideas for posts. That’s the hope anyway, but nine times out of ten a podcast is just a podcast. Even the most inspirational ones (which, for whatever reason, seem to be science podcasts from NPR) yield bupkiss more often than not.

Not so the other day. Invisabilia touts itself as the podcast that hopes to look closer at “Unseeable forces contr...