Two years ago, when I was a newcomer to Media Watch, I went to the Logies for the first time. They put me on the top ABC table, with, among others, Managing Director Mark Scott, grown-up actor William McInnes and child star Bindi Irwin, whose TV series Bindi: The Jungle Girl was screening on ABC Kids.

Bindi was only nine. She was charming. She signed an autograph for my then-7-year-old daughter, who was impressed that for once her dad had met someone interesting.

I skipped last year - when you have to catch an 8:00am flight back to Sydney to record Media Watch, a late night of partying in Melbourne loses a lot of its appeal. But this year I decided to give it another go, and found myself sitting at the same table as Wil Anderson.

The ABC delivered us late to the Crown Palladium. So I must have missed the appeal to guests not to Twitter. Wil was enthusiastically tweeting away, so I pulled out the iPhone and sat around trying to think of witty and amusing things to say to keep my meagre 2,000 or so followers happy. (Wil, I believe, has upwards of 33,000).

Early on, he sent this tweet: "Jonathan Holmes is at my table. Hope they read out my tweets in those sexy media watch voice..."

The final s of 'voices' was presumably the 141st character, and was ruthlessly excised by Twitter. In any case, I doubt we'll be reading out Wil's tweets next Monday. We've been beaten to it by Today Tonight, A Current Affair, and a dozen shocked shock-jocks.

Wil Anderson, like Catherine Deveny, is a professional comedian. Deveny writes a regular column for The Age, but it's not her employer. Anderson presents The Gruen Transfer and used to present the Glass House for the ABC, but it's not his employer. Whether The Age has issued guidelines on the use of Twitter by those who are its employees, I'm not sure; but the ABC certainly has.

Its guidance to ABC staff who have private Twitter accounts consists of just four short sentences. One is: "Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute"; another: "Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views".

But for those who, like me, have an 'ABC account', which can be listed and cross-promoted on ABC platforms, it's a different matter. The guidance note states baldly:

If a complaint is received about content on an ABC account, the ABC accepts responsibility and the Editorial Policies apply.

Whoa! Though they're in the process of being radically pruned, the ABC's Editorial Policies currently run to 100 pages, not including appendices. That's a lot to bear in mind when you're sending 140 characters.

Little wonder that the ABC's most-followed tweeters - people like Lateline's Leigh Sales (@leighsales, for Twitter-users) or PM's Mark Colvin (@colvinius) are careful. They make bad jokes from time to time, and indeed good ones, but you'll never catch them tweeting an obscenity or voicing an opinion on a matter of political controversy. Much of the time they simply point their followers to interesting things they've read or seen somewhere on the web.

Even Jonathan Green, the editor of The Drum, has become more cautious since his little green frog icon migrated from Crikey to the ABC late last year.

Yet Twitter derives much of its attraction from its spontaneity - and indeed, from its rudeness. Tweeters use bad language. Tweeters scoff, and deride, and fulminate, and whinge. Some of them, it must be said, could also bore for Australia.

But the ABC knows what it's doing. For when Catherine Deveny complains that tweeting is like passing notes in school, she's being disingenuous. She apparently has 4,726 followers right now - I'm not sure if that number has gone up or down since Logies night - but any of them can retweet anything she says to a wider audience. More to the point, the offending tweets all carried the hashtag #logies, which meant that they would be read by any Twitter-user interested in the Logies that night. They were very public indeed.

She also claimed she was taken out of context. I'm not the first to remark that Twitter has no context. Each tweet must stand alone, 140 characters max. Hard to convey irony, or amusement, or hate. Hard to convey that when you say you hope Bindi gets laid, you're using satire "to expose celebrity raunch culture and the sexual objectification of women".

Twitter is a treacherous medium. So fast, so simple, so easy to get wrong.

There's the fact that, unless you have a huge following, a lot of the time you're exchanging messages with a small circle. It's easy to forget the larger world out there. And it's easy to make mistakes. I did it myself on Logies night, and I've been dreading being quoted ever since. So I thought I'd out myself before anyone else does.

It happened when Don Lane's son PJ was on stage commemorating his dad. Much of his act consisted of a fax purportedly sent by the great man from heaven.

It was excruciating. Joke after joke fell flat. Some of it was downright tasteless, like the stuff about Carl Williams's recent arrival (in heaven! What was St Peter thinking?)

But I'd not been paying attention when PJ was introduced, and my grasp of popular culture isn't what it should be. I was under the impression that, like many Americans, Don had named his son after himself. I thought he was called 'Don Lane Jr'.

So I tweeted: 'Don Lane Jr. Oh dear! Don Lame'

I meant, of course, that the tribute by the son, not the life and work of his father, was lame. But it wouldn't have read like that to many Twitter users.

And there was another thing I didn't know. Whether because Nine agreed with my assessment, or because they were desperately trying to get the show down to some sort of bearable length, Don Lane's putative fax from heaven wasn't included in the program that went to air. So no-one watching the show at home would have known what on Earth I was on about.

It was the only negative tweet I sent that evening. I didn't give the game away by tweeting winners. I didn't tweet much at all, if truth be told. But I could so easily have ended up being pilloried alongside Deveny and Anderson.

As it was, the worst thing I copped was a return tweet from someone called @BazzaBC, a person of indeterminate gender whose profile simply reads "Pig. Philosopher. Drunk." BazzaBC's tweet read: "@jonaholmesMW I didn't pick you as being such an old bitch."

Fair enough. If my tweet had been picked up by the MSM (mainstream media, in case you're not into the blogosphere) I too would have pleaded I'd been taken out of context. But really, I wouldn't have had much of a leg to stand on.

But then, I was using an 'ABC Twitter account'. The ABC's Editorial Policies apply. Wil Anderson wasn't, any more than Catherine Deveny was tweeting for The Age. Wil will be back on the ABC in June, presenting The Gruen Transfer series 3. Tasteless though her tweets undoubtedly were, I'm one of those who think The Age has done itself no favours by sacking Catherine Deveny for being who she is.

Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of ABC TV's Media Watch.