As soon as our gaggle settled in for the first meeting on the blogger’s tour in Hutchinson, Kansas, we started whipping out the laptops, cameras and other geek accoutrements.

That’s what those who are wired into the social web do – we start connecting immediately.

Bloggers are natural connectors, but we do it differently than some, and we use Web tools in ways that seem strange to the unplugged.

Sitting around the table, we introduced ourselves and ate box lunches while we yakked, tweeted and photographed everything.

At one point, I pulled this enormous cookie from my lunch and made some joke about it, and small business whiz Becky McCray pulled out her camera to take a photo.

You could sense that our Hutchinson hosts thought we were a bit silly, photographing everything, but I said, “Just you wait, this cookie can get around, and we’ll use it to talk about your town.”

• The “Hutch cookie” lives on Becky McCray’s Facebook profile under Photos. More importantly, it’s in the Hutch Blogger Tour set. That set shows people some of the neat stuff we saw in Hutchinson (and every time she uploaded something to it, everyone in her Facebook network saw it.)

• Because I’m tagged in it, the photo shows up under Photos of Sheila in my Facebook profile. It showed up in my Facebook network when I was tagged. It shows up again when I post a link to this post on my Facebook Wall.

• I tweeted that I was writing this post about this cookie.

• I tweeted about the cookie after the “Share your cookies with your imaginary Internet friends” was posted.  Because the post was hashtagged with #Hutch (the Hutchinson-related hashtag) it also shows up in Twitter Search.

• The tweet showed up on my FriendFeed page.

• It’s got a Hutchinson tag where I’ve saved it on my Delicious bookmarking page, and it’s on StumbleUpon as well.

• What the heck, it’s on my Plurk page, too.

Yes, it’s only a cookie. It’s a seemingly pointless photo; but, it will live on forever, and so will our words about Hutchinson, Kansas.

THAT’S why the Web is powerful as hell.

(Disclosure:  My visit to Hutchinson was a press trip sponsored by the Cosmosphere and Hutchinson CVB, who paid for my lodging and expenses while I was in town. They did not tell me what I could or could not write about. I paid my own airfare to/from Kansas.)