Podcast Vibes Prototyping

I’m considering turning my little research note on podcast vibes into a bit more of a product. The idea would be to track the daily pulse of the podcast ecosystem in terms of the subjects it discusses and the emotions it puts out.

This weekend I played around with a few visualization ideas for looking at the emotional subjects for a single episode at a time.

The picture below shows all of the subjects discussed on a recent podcast interview with a bean enthusiast, with subjects discussed positively colored green and those discussed negatively colored red.

The annotations are picked at regular samples across the emotional spectrum so that the labels don’t overlap. I think it would be better to instead draw attention to the most salient discussion points.

Here’s how the same kind of picture looks for a longer podcast episode:

And here’s one for a podcast with a much more negative slant. Amusingly, the most positive segments of this one are the ads. While looking at the transcript DeepSeek R1 complimented the host on his ability to smoothly and undetectably transition from the interview into an advertising segment.

Here’s how it might look to lay out the dots on a horizontal timeline, with negatives segmented from positives.

Anyway, just some early explorations. Still getting used to publishing this stuff in such an early state, but here we go.