So yesterday afternoon I was sitting in Room 171 of the state Capitol for that meeting of the legislative committee on prison woes. I glanced at this handy Blackberry to check e-mails. And then it occurred to me, quite suddenly and spontaneously, that, for kicks, I could thumb around on that Blackberry and tweet the meeting, just like these kids do.

“Tweet the meeting” means file a succession of real-time reports of 140 characters or fewer on my account on Twitter.com about what was going on at the meeting.

So I just hauled off and did it. In minutes a few of the legislators attending the meeting were saying things, then checking their own Twitter accounts to see my tweets about what they’d just said. Interactive, I believe this is called.

A few people began tweeting about how I was tweeting. One guy thought my tweeting was a bigger story than the meeting.

Another guy retweeted to say that one of my tweets didn’t make any damned sense. Actually, as I read back over the stream, as you can do here, I find that at least two of my rat-a-tat tweets don’t make any sense, and that others are beset with typos.

That’s because I’m not yet thumb-proficient (insert joke here) and I was thumbing fast to keep up, and I don’t see the little keyboard all that well, even with these reading glasses, and, finally, I’m not yet adept at reducing matters to 140 characters.

Anyway, it was fun and interesting and reasonably worthwhile. I suspect I’ll do it again sometime.

But I must say that I still greatly prefer letting everything percolate in my mind for a while and then penning a carefully composed traditional newspaper column seeking to analyze matters in some depth. That’s what I offer for tomorrow’s column, or so I attempt and hope, on this prison affair.