This is a deeply personal episode. I spent most of my life within a 60 miles radius of where I was born. That all changed when I relocated to the Portland, Oregon metro area. I came here on a fact-finding mission in 2017 and fell head-over-heels in love with the place. It's no accident in the slightest that the most creative period in my entire life has transpired right here in Portland. I guess that's why it's a real sore spot for me when I see Portland dragged through the mud in the press—not to mention the whole concept of living in a dense urban environment. Are moving to the suburbs really the answer to the challenges of pandemic living? Does living in a "hip" city really have any influence on high-level creativity and artistic scope? Tune in to hear my story and my take.
Tumblr is a social media platform heralding from a different time…the era of “Web 2.0”, when oodles of visual customization features were a given and open functionality like RSS feeds were compulsory. Yahoo! and Verizon nearly drove Tumblr to an early grave, but with the acquisition by Automattic, there is hope yet. Can Tumblr survive—nay—thrive in 2021? Jared White investigates.
The vital necessity of competence in leadership and governance, life imitating art imitating life, and a megadose of fascinating news regarding Twitter’s forays into decentralization and open moderation tools…all on the latest installment of Fresh Fusion.
In the wake of last week's horrific events at the United States Capitol where domestic terrorists stormed into the building and nearly toppled a duly-elected Congress, one of the top questions on everyone's mind is: what is the role of Big Tech in the face of extremism and anti-democratic conspiracy theories? What should Twitter, or Facebook, or Amazon, or Google, etc., be doing about all this? Do we even want them making unilateral descisions at such fundamental levels which affect policy making and political discourse? And just where did this violent strain of conservative evangelicalism come from anyway? All this and more right here on the Fresh Fusion podcast.
This is it! Tune in for all the juicy details of why I walked away from Mastodon and the “Fediverse” after a year of fanboyism, and what needs to change in open social networking protocols before I let go of Twitter and Discord.
My year in review episode. What a year! What a review! Ooo boy. Tune in to hear how my "3 Words for 2020" went and what I'm looking forward to in 2021. Surely everything's going to get better, right? RIGHT??!!
I just came back from a retreat. Wow! The saying is true: change of pace + change of place = change of perspective. As creators, we're always working in one of two modes: the nose to the grindstone, going through the motions of daily output mode; and the 20,000 feet, blue sky thinking mode. It's difficult, if not impossible, to get into that second mode in the same physical environment as where you're typically heads down making incremental progress. Let's dive into the vital importance of getting away in order to reinvent everything.
Do you ever find yourself watching a video on YouTube from your favorite creator, only to find that—as the video plays—it slowly dawns on you that the whole story arc of the video was simply a pretense for a sponsored product promotion? Sucks right? Because as a content creator, if you lose the trust of your audience, what do you have? Nothing. Let's talk about that. Also: I only use Rollings Reliable Baking Powder.
You can enjoy the process, and optionally you can enjoy the outcome of that enjoyable process, but you can't enjoy the outcome if you hate the process. The ends never justify the means. Also on today's episode: my spoiler-free review of "Seduced", the shocking sex cult documentary now playing on Starz.
It's the first official new episode of Fresh Fusion, and it's a doozy! There's an oft-expressed notion rooted in misguided pragmatism that says your users/customers/audience don't care about the tools you use behind the scenes. They only care about the final product. I fundamentally reject such a notion, and I'm here to tell you why. Users DO care about the tools you use, because you MAKE them care. That's your job as a creator. That's your job as a marketer. Let's dive in!
As the Year from Hell heads towards its inevitable conclusion, Jared is back from a retreat born from desperation, fully recharged, and ready to (*gasp!*) reboot the podcast in a new form. And so a hearty hello and welcome to Fresh Fusion, the new weekly show by Jared focused squarely on the business and art of content creation. Whether you write, record, code, produce, teach, or perform, this is your show. This is your time. This is…well, you get the idea!
Greetings, fellow citizens of the internet refuge from the global pandemic! How are you surviving Crisis? I am, to echo the words of Morpheus, STILL HERE! In this episode I bring you up to speed on what I've been up to…some fun things, some rewarding things, and one terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing I've been battling with for a couple of months now (predating the coronavirus lockdown!).
What a strange and frightening time to be alive! But I'm here and I'm back to try to lighten the mood a bit with talk of the brand-new cursor and trackpad support for iPad in iPadOS 13.4, as well as speculation on how the sudden transition to remote work might change the business landscape for good as we look ahead. I also convey my impressions using Photoshop for iPad now that the new cursor-based input brings the user experience closer to the Mac and even surpasses it in many ways.
Kicking off our Creator Series, Nathan joins Jared to talk about his journey from software developer to YouTube content creator, the challenges and rewards of presenting your authentic self, ups and downs in entrepreneurship, what's the deal with privacy and the tech industry, centralized vs. decentralized social media, diversity in startup culture, and introducing children to an engineer's mindset. There's also something about tampons in there…it makes sense in context, I swear!
I haven't talked much about the general state of social media on the show in a while, so it's high time we revisit this topic! Here are my latest thoughts on all the top contenders large and small—what they're getting right, or wrong, and what is coming down the pike. You might be surprised where my head is at these days…
