It all began back in the halcyon days of mp3.com, that great indy music site that is now legendary among unsigned musicians on the 'net. MP3.com was a great site with a lot of great musicians. It also had a rich assortment of tools so that the listener could find the music that he or she was looking for. Since the demise of mp3.com I've discovered that finding indy music and musicians on the net is like finding a needle in a haystack. MP3.com had tools that made finding the needles fairly easy.

I had quite a bit of my music on the site. I even had a CD on the mp3.com "label." The problem was my name. There were hundreds of Jims, Jim Nelsons, James Nelson, and JE Nelsons. But no one had taken "Just Another Jim," so that became my moniker. Within a couple of months I started getting included on other people's play lists and pretty soon folks out there in internet land were actually listening to my music.

Then Vivendi bought mp3.com.

To make a long story short, Vivendi commercialized the site. Since commercialization is antithetic to what mp3.com was all about, the site failed. (Actually, site was doing fine, but Vivendi wasn't making as much profit as they wanted.) So Vivendi--now Vivendi/Universal--shut down the site and the mp3.com domain name was sold to C/Net. C/Net revived the domain as a place to push corporate music, so the mp3.com site has become precisely what the original site was trying to counteract. Other sites have tried to fill the void, but none of the other options offered the resources that were once available on mp3.com.

Enter my brother, T.K., an internet industry insider.

T.K. proposed setting up a a site under the name justanotherjim.com. When I dragged my feet, he went out, got the domain name and arranged the storage space. Suddenly I had a place for all my music.

I knew virtually nothing about html when this project started. That's a lot of the reason the design of the site has changed so many times: I keep experimenting trying to get it right. In the process of designing a site, I decided I should try some other things along with just posting mp3's. I decided to post some of my poetry and also thought I'd start writing essays, because I love the art of the essay.

All of those varied interests led to the archived web site available here. I also have a music presence on SoundClick.com and SongPlanet.com. A few of my watercolors, etc, are on DeviantArt.com. I also published a poetry collection on lulu.com and the mp3.com music collections are now CDs available at CafePress.com (under the name Just Another Jim). The legacy JAJ site is the clearinghouse for all these projects.

But after several years of writing weekly essays, the long form essays had become stale. I had resisted turning the JAJ site into a blog for a few years because I didn't have a good reason to do it other than being trendy. But now I see things differently. I believe the shorter form of blog posts in conjunction with easier feedback that WordPress provides can freshen up my writing.

But don't forget, all that other stuff - music, poetry, and long form essays, are still available on the legacy site.