I guess this is a few months old but I must have missed it the first time around. Even Elmo can’t keep a straight face.

You may have noticed that I did a little bit of tidying up on the site today, and in the sidebar I also added a list of my most recently shared links on bit.ly. Allow me to explain what this is, and why you might want to consider using it.

For a long time, I was using del.icio.us extensively to bookmark interesting links and then repost them here, but I kind of stopped using it after Twitter took over my life (and everyone else’s). As I mentioned not too long ago, Twitter has taken the place of this blog in a lot of ways, and I’ve been sharing my random linkage on there instead. The problem with Twitter is that the posts can only be 140 characters long, which has made URL shortening services essential. This is where bit.ly comes in.

Unlike a lot of the other URL shortening sites, bit.ly offers some cool additional features if you sign up for an account. It will store all of your recent links and give you a compact URL, but it can also track how many people have clicked on it, and it offers an API and RSS feed for your recent links. While it doesn’t allow you to enter tags or any additional information about the links like del.icio.us does (leading to some ugly and/or useless titles for the links), and it doesn’t have a full social network built-in as of yet, it can auto-post your links to Twitter and also back up the page you are linking to in case it gets overloaded with traffic or eventually goes away. Some people have suggested that it might have the potential to become the new Digg.

Either way, I’m going to start using bit.ly in basically the same way that I used del.icio.us previously, so if you want to see what I’ve been stumbling across on the web lately, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for my account, or just check out the sidebar of this site on a regular basis.

Ahh, New York. The city that never sleeps. There’s nowhere else in the world quite like it (you know, aside from the many other large and congested cities on this planet). But it’s not just a place to live… it’s also an attitude! Here are some photos from our trip to the Big Apple (does anyone actually call it that anymore?) a couple of weeks back. All pictures were taken with a Sony DSLR-A200 that I still don’t really know how to use.

Check out the full Flickr set here.

I’m just here to confirm what most of you have probably already realized: Twitter killed my personal blog. Hey, it was bound to happen eventually… this site was seriously lacking a direction in the first place. I just wanted somewhere to share some quick thoughts and random links, and now Twitter has filled that void, for better or worse. Most of my posts here had already been whittled down to single sentence anyway.

It seems like a lot of other people are experiencing the same problem. It’s pretty hard to resist sending out a quick 140 character message instead of putting in the extra time to write up a full post about something. For all I know, Twitter may kill blogging entirely (followed by every other form of intelligent communication on the planet Earth). It’s just so quick and easy, and allows for more immediate feedback. Besides, would it really be such a bad thing if there were a few million less blogs out there?

So for now this site will probably just remain a shell for my Twitter account and a central hub for any other projects I’ve got going on. I may throw up the occasional longer post, but I don’t think the “Media Bytes” sub-heading will really apply anymore. I’d like to redesign it all if I can get up the motivation, but until then, what you see is what you get.

I should mention that I’m currently trying to revive my dying music blog by shifting toward music videos instead of MP3s. I’m not sure if it will stick, but my main concern right now is keeping it easy to update. I’ve also had ideas for a couple of other blogs on the back burner for a while now, but I think the only way they’ll ever see the light of day is if Film Junk outlives its usefulness (which is something I’m starting to feel almost every other day).

In conclusion, if you want to be where the action is, make sure you follow @filmjunk on Twitter, subscribe to the RSS feed, or simply bookmark my Twitter page.