When part of my job at a meeting or conference is to send little updates from the “field” (for me, that generally means a beige-walled breakout room in a Washington hotel), I have to overcome my usual long-windedness and whittle my tweets down to size.
In the process, I get pretty self-conscious about tapping away on my BlackBerry. The iPad helps, but if there’s no wi-fi, I usually scribble them in my notepad. To count characters, I put together this half-page form with plenty of room for two 140-character blocks of text. Each line of each half is 20 characters, and the last line is dashed as a rumble strip for leaving enough space for retweeting.
(I’ve also added the PDF as a background in Note Taker HD and use it as in the image above.)
Here’s the form. I might add some little reminders about bit.ly URL lengths, etc. to the bottom down the road.
