It is now really easy to add a profile picture to your 65hours account. So what are you waiting for? Logon and upload a picture now so we can all see who we are exchanging our time with.

Huge thanks to Martin Hertig for providing his time to add this feature!

Here at 65hours I have been working on making it easier to find people with skills and requests in your area. A nice visual way to see who is out there and where they are is to plot everyone who has included a location in their profile on a map.

The results can be found here http://65hours.com/map showing that 65hours has truly gone global! There are 65hours members spread right across the world offering a huge range of skills and looking to get involved in all manner of interesting requests.

To find out a bit more about each member just click on a pin and follow the more details link - you will have to sign up to see what skills and requests are on offer though.

If you have any feedback on the map or if you have any other ideas that would make 65hours easier to use or more useful please pop them on our feedback forum - thanks!

A few people have been asking me why the site is called 65hours so here is the explanation. If you take the total number of hours in a week (168 in case you were wondering) and subtract time for sleeping, working and eating you are left with roughly 65 hours. In time banking terms this is your weekly disposable income that you choose to do what you want with. You could choose to go to the cinema, go for a beer or read a book. The point is we all choose what to do with this time so why not choose to get involved in time banking? Go on...put your skills to good use, connect with some new people and take advantage of the skills that can be found in the fantastic 65hours community. Sign up now!

Time banking has, so far, mainly been used in relatively small physical communities. Often these communities are targetted because thay are seen as being in need of some of the extra social cohesion that time banks can encourage. One organisation in Wales who work to set up this kind of project are SPICE who do excellent work with groups of people who feel disempowered and disengaged. Whilst this is a very worthy application for time banking the benefits aren't limited to these communities, after all, most of us could probably do with a helping hand or someone with a skill we don't have at some point.

With a platform like 65hours the potential audience becomes much larger than a single time bank or group of people. As a result the reasons for using time banking multiply as different groups see the potential for how it could compliment activities they are already involved in.

Take, for example, the web or tech community who are working to help businesses and consumers get more value from the Internet by building websites and digital content. This is made up of a collection of companies and individuals who have a range of design, development, copy writing, information architecture, content strategy and user experience skills. For small companies or individuals it is often tempting to try and do everything in house as margins are squeezed when work is outsourced. This could mean that a developer ends up writing content or a designer is left in charge of UX. Whilst this is unlikely to end in complete disaster there is a benefit to using specialists in these areas which leads to a better final product and a more satisfied customer.

Rather than having to outsource this work what if there was a way to swap some of the skills you had for other skills that you needed? This is where time banking and 65hours helps you find those extra skills without having to stump up any cash. Just use the credit from your time banking account to pay for the specialist skills you don't have in house. You can then build credit back up by using the skills you do have doing jobs for other people during down periods. This has a double benefit, not only do you get someone with the right skills for the job you can also use 65hours as a way to make productive use of your time during lean periods. Rather than losing that time forever it is possible to find a job on 65hours and bank the credit earned for the next time you need access to other skills.

This is just one example - the same argument could be made for almost any industry. So, who can use time banking? The simple answer is, anybody - we all have skills and we could all benefit from people with different skills to us at some point.

What do you think? How could time banking be used in your community, business or industry? 

Time banking allows people to pay for services like gardening, accounting, cleaning or web design without having to use money. Instead, someone can use the credit they have built up in their time bank account by doing jobs for other people to pay for the services they need.

Possibly the biggest advantage of time banking is that you don't need money to access services and skills all you need is a bit of spare time and a skill that someone else can use. This is where 65hours comes in to provide an easy to way to match people with skills to people who have a need for that skill.

Traditionally time banking has been used as a way to encourage community and to bring people closer together by providing mutual support, valuing the skills people have and encouraging personal interaction. Time Banking UK works to promote time banking in relatively small physical communities and provides some great information on this form of time banking. 65hours aims to make time banking easily accessible to a wider audience whilst also introducing features that encourage the community aspects of physically located time banks.

So, if time banking sounds good to you, register with 65hours now - it only takes a few seconds and you get 2 hours of credit in your account to get you started.

Thanks to the awesome Graeme Metcalf for agreeing to work on 65hours with me to add some much needed design panache!

Due to his hard work and a bit of my monkeying about with the html and css the homepage is looking great and over the next few weeks we will be updating the pages inside the site to improve ease of use and to make them look as good as the homepage.

In other news, I have just agreed to do a 5 minute flash talk at the next SuperMondays so if you are interested in hearing a bit more about 65hours.com and how you could make use of the service then come along.

Hello and welcome to the bloggings for the time bank 65hours.

65hours is currently being developed but there is just about enough there to make it worthwhile taking a look around. Sign up for an account and provide feedback on the idea of time banking on the web or just let us know if you find a bug. You can do both of these through our UserVoice forum.

In future posts you will be able to find out a bit more about what time banking is, why it is a great idea and how you can get involved.

Watch this space!