With all the talk of credit crunches, sub-prime mortgage crises, and all that follows from them it can be difficult to know how to make sense of it all. When you add in the fact that money is a far more complicated beast than most of us realise it’s pretty bewildering.

Ann Pettifor is an expert in getting to grips with these issues, communicating them and campaigning on them. And I’m very pleased to say that you can now find her blogging at debtonation.org, the result of a quick project Jenny Brown and I have been working on.

There are lots of talks of exciting spin-offs, campaigns for more effective regulation of the financial sector, and the likes, but for now the key thing is to get Ann’s writings on the topic out there, building reputation and conversation. A quick blog fit the bill just right, so we’ve kept it at that. Where it goes from there will unfold over the coming months.

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Four years ago, give or take, a small group keen to see how their individual steps towards a more generous way of living added up, came up with the idea of A Year Of Living Generously. Through the web a group of people could signal their commitment to various steps that might help their communities inch closer to the way they’d like them to be. Drew built a website for the nascent group. That year became two, and then three, and the community grew. A few like-minded projects emerged, though mostly focussed on all things “green” without so much on Generous’ other concerns.

Last autumn, partially motivated by the impending launch of a book containing many of our actions, a group of us gathered to talk about refocussing Generous, and I was asked to pick up the technical lead as we implemented a new design (driven by the work of Wilf, Chantal and Paul), added a few features, and prepared a new business model.

Two weeks ago we quietly launched that new site, and today we announced it to our members. It only seemed appropriate to mention it here too. You can find it at generous.org.uk.

(For those who are wondering, I do hope to post something other than project announcements here some time soon but as you can imagine, shipping takes priority over writing.)

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Discussion about the future of the music industry abounds. Whether it’s advice for artists or labels, discussions of the release of new technologies, or predictions for the future, there’s a lot of it out there. It’s good to get a range of perspectives, but until now it’s been hard to know where to get started if you want to delve into that world.

Today I’m announcing the launch of Future Music Talk, a site pulling together blog entries from a range of thinkers and practitioners. For those familiar with such things it’s a variant of the Planet-style sites so popular in the web development community (it’s powered by Planet Venus).

I’m very pleased with the balance amongst the initial contributors, including as it does Gerd Leonard and Dave Kusek, authors of The Future of Music, Andrew Dubber whose recent series of definitions is a must-read, Bruce Warila, Steve Lawson, Justin Boland, and Million Media.

It doesn’t stop there, so if you are running a blog on a related topic, drop me a line at james@jystewart.net and we can see about getting you included. Over the next few weeks I’m hoping to add a few other features (including drawing in links tagged futuremusictalk on delicious).

So take a look over at www.futuremusictalk.com, subscribe to the feed, and join the conversation.

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The content on this blog has been a bit more diverse of late and while I tend to take the approach that if I enjoy some of the content on a blog I might as well keep an eye on all of their content to get a more rounded view of the writer, I recognise that some readers may not be interested in tracking everything. As a result I’ve added separate feeds for my two key consulting foci. So if you’re just here for musings on music on the web, you might want to grab this feed and if you’re looking for thinking on the web and other technology for charities, campaigns and other non-profits then you’ll want this one. The main feed remains at its existing location.

I’m using feedburner to serve my various feeds and provide some statistics about their readership. The FeedSmith plugin makes it much easier to integrate that with this wordpress-based blog, but in some ways it’s a shame that it doesn’t automate the process of adding extra feeds. It’d be very nice to have a way to tell it “add a feedburner feed for tag X”. If it did, I’d probably try to automate that so that users could subscribe to very targetted chunks of content. As it is, for now hopefully these two extra feeds will help some people handle their blog intake a little more easily.

(this may also be an appropriate moment to apologise to anyone who was trying to access this site overnight. a slight change to my DNS settings had some unforeseen consequences. that is now taken care of and everything should be a little more stable than before as the site is sitting on a new hosting account)

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With a few projects coming to an end it turns out I have some time on my hands that I could do with filling with some paying work. I’m an experienced web developer, having been building sites and applications for eleven or twelve years now. I prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, and have been doing so for two years, but am comfortable in a range of environments and want my tools to match the project as well as possible. I frequently find myself working with drupal, and as an eight-year PHP veteran, that’s okay.

I’m particularly passionate about helping charities, music organisations, and magazine publishers make use of the web as effectively as possible. I can help such organisations work out how what they do in other environments translates to the web, and then to build the tools to make that happen. I prefer nuance to buzzwords, but I can throw around the appropriate Web 2.0 terms if I have to.

(and if you don’t fit in that list but have a project you think I might find interesting, I’m still interested in hearing from you)

I’m used to working solo, or in a small team, and have experience of leading teams as well as being a member. I’d prefer something in or around London, but usually work from home and am quite open to remote working.

I’ve got three, or maybe four days available for the next couple of months. You can reach me at james@jystewart.net to find out more.

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