One of the first thoughts that occurred to me, on this first morning after vacation, is that we tech types sure know how to get excited about minutiae that in the final analysis probably won't really matter.

"Her surgery is tomorrow morning and she's not at all nervous! Please say a prayer for her and think of her tomorrow at 7:30 when surgery begins." This was the first entry posted on the site "Heal Fast Billie" hosted on CarePages through the hospital where a preteen I know just had surgery.

This week, instead of reporting from the red comfy chair in the living room, I'm reporting from sunny - if cold, Lake Tahoe - where MediaPost is hosting its first-ever Social Media Insider Summit. By day, we've been attending panels and keynotes about where, when, how and if employees should tweet; by night we've been using Google Sky Maps to figure out what the constellations are above our heads. Yes, it's a geek-a-thon!

I don't even want everyone using Barcode Hero because then my kingdoms will crumble. If it becomes a great recommendation engine, though, I may gracefully let a few of my titles lapse.

guess that MG Siegler's column yesterday on TechCrunch, asking whether Facebook should adopt a friend and a follower system, resonated with me because I've been thinking about the nature of my social networking relationships lately as well. I finally got around to decoupling my tweets from my status updates earlier this month -- 15 seconds that I should have found in my schedule at least a year ago.

Hey, Foursquare, a social network with about 250 times as many users as yours just incorporated your core functionality and even co-opted the term "check-in" that you've been trying to trademark. Is it time to move on?

I interrupt the usual stream of tweets, status updates and check-ins to say a thing or two about the brand new geo-location tool Facebook Places, which, if you think about it, actually conflates all three. (Or it could, if I could just get access to it in this, its first morning of existence.

While for many people a single check-in is a check-in too many, I enjoy some of the benefits that check-in services provide. Yet checking in somewhere is different than checking into a TV show or some form of recorded entertainment. Here are several reasons why:

To pick up where last week's column left off, here's one answer to the question "Has Social Media Killed the Portal?" No, but to portals, it sure looks like an excellent life raft. Seems that while I was writing last Wednesday about Facebook's rising advertising fortunes -- and AOL's sinking ones -- the two were actually in talks to create one of those storied strategic alliances.

It was a strange experience working as a social marketing strategist while planning my July vacation to South America. I had especially high hopes for question and answer sites, given how much they've evolved since the days when it was just Yahoo Answers competing with the now-defunct Google Answers. I thought I'd write a column about the recommendations the sites provided, but then I started asking questions and the answers underwhelmed.