Picture this, as Sophia says on "The Golden Girls." It's Austin, 2011. You're at the most buzzed-about interactive media event in the world. You want to meet up with a couple of friends at one of the better parties among at least a dozen viable options happening right now. What do you do?

While many of you are at SXSW, I'm here in the still-chilly Northeast, removing programs from a bloated, old Dell laptop, in the hopes that at the end of the process, it will still be usable enough to satisfy the game-playing needs of a 13-year-old. Doing such a thing is like holding a software retrospective, which means it also serves as a reminder of how much has changed since four years ago, when I first bought this laptop that now qualifies as arthritic. Four years ago, Facebook was still primarily a plaything for the college-age-and-younger set; this week, people are …

Unlike my December trip to South America, I was fine staying somewhat connected digitally while in South Africa, Tanzania's mainland, Zanzibar, and Amsterdam during 17 days away. While visiting places that felt so foreign (I'll take getting woken up by monkeys instead of garbage trucks any day), it was fun to have a few comforts of home with me. That included dabbling in social media, often with unexpected results.

Oh, Twitterati. you are not as intellectual as you Sheen -- I mean seem. I've been appalled at the fact I've actually caught people such as @ShellyKramer and @Jason, tweeting about Sheen today because everyone seems to want in on this one. Hell, I found out that Sheen had an official Twitter account from Benjamin Palmer on Tumblr. Sad.

The Internet may never forget, but clearly most people can't seem to remember much about network history past their last few status updates. Had we all remembered the historic U.S. immigration protests of 2006, largely organized through MySpace and other network media channels, perhaps Malcolm Gladwell may have never written (and would not still be attempting to justify) his essay from last October.

It looks, thankfully, that reports that the blog is dead are greatly exaggerated.

Facebook is at the center of what can only be called a media profundity. Even as those of us in the business figure out how to market brands on Facebook, and also use it to catch up with our uncles and the latest gossip, it is also proving game-changing in ways that are exponentially more significant than, say, whether or not Oreos this week set the world record for Facebook "Likes." (It did, for 24 hours, only to be out-liked by Lil' Wayne.)

I bet you think I'm talking about Groupon here, which faced a well-deserved firestorm of online protest online over its Super Bowl ad that actually mocked the plight of the people of Tibet to get more people to sign up for pedicure discounts. (OK, that's the Cliff Notes version.) But I'm not. I'm still hung up on Kenneth Cole, who last week, infamously tweeted: "Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo --KC." Whoops.

Happy Social Media Week! Yes, boys and girls, it's that time of year when you drop what you're doing and go to any of hundreds of amazing events around the world that explore the infinite facets of social media. Why, for people like me, it's like Christmas and Diwali and National Fried Chicken Day rolled into one. In honor of this sacred week, I'll offer ten reasons why Social Media Week should be every week.

If my flight had only been delayed, I could be learning more about mobile at Mediapost's Mobile Insider Summit (and probably spending more quality time on the beach). Instead, I'm on the flight home as I write this, after chairing Mediapost's second Social Media Insider Summit, which means my head is positively brimming with thoughts of what the big takeaways were.