October’s been a pretty eventful month for us, with Gioia’s parents who came for a visit (story and pics on the blog, of course), myself pretty busy with the refereeing (with good news promotion-wise on that end), halloween bowling and baking extravaganza at work.

But now it’s time to leave October behind – my AC Milan calendar (my mum gives me one as a present for Christmas every year) has Ronaldinho and Papastathopoulos on the October page, so it’s probably about time – and enter one of the most exciting months of the year, Movember.

Yep, you read that right, it’s Movember. November is boring, cold, there’s less light in the day and all that. Movember is cool and fun. “What is Movember?”, I hear some of you ask.

Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in the UK and around the world. The aim of which is to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.

What that means in practice is I’m going to “donate my face” for the whole of the month, will grow a moustache and will raise funds and awareness for the likes of The Prostate Cancer Charity, The Institute of Cancer Research and of course The Movember Foundation.

And that’s what I’ll do. What can you do? You can help me in my journey of ever-growing facial hair in the upper-lip region and (please!) donate what you can.

We’re getting pretty excited about all this at We Are Social Towers, and we’ve set up a 10+ strong team (which you can donate to directly in case, say, you hate me but love We Are Social) ready to kick off clean shaven on Tuesday morning (our progress will of course be trackable on the dedicated Tumblr) and to grow lovely moustaches for charity for the coming 30 days.

So please, show us your support: grow your own Mo or help us raise funds! (and thanks once again to everyone who supported Gioia)

My "Share of cake" cake - pic courtesy of lovelychaos. on Flickr

As anticipated, this year’s Blog Action Day topic is Water.

It’s not easy to consider ourselves lucky to have clean water: at the end of the day, we’ve grown up with clean and fresh water always available, and hot water when needed, only a tap turn away, it’s always been there. But obviously that’s not the case for everyone, and we do need to consider ourselves lucky.

Water is not something I know  a great deal about, so I’ll leave it to you.

As some of you might remember, last year on October 15 we discussed about Climate Change as part of Blog Action Day 2009, giving our 2 cents. This year, on the same date, Blog Action Day 2010 will try to address the problem of water.

We will try to do our bit this year, too.

Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »

I bet you guys love it when people like you, right? Well, we do too.

We have recently been included in a comprehensive list of 50+ Europe Travel blogs.

We are of course very proud about being included but, at the same time, extremely happy about discovering other blogs we did not know about and we can now follow and “steal” tips from!

Thanks to the guys at GuideToOnlineSchools for including us!

Hi folks (we’re just back from Dublin, apparently not saying folks is illegal there), we just wanted to share with you a little gem that we found on the interwebs the other day. As the title of this post might suggest, it’s a visualisation of the recent mess caused by the Eyafjallajokull volcano. We were lucky, and were not affected, although we did fly the week after the air space was shut in half-Europe. Unfortunately, Gioia’s parents were supposed to fly to Spain but decided not to, they didn’t want to risk being stranded in Seville.

Anyways, enough with the chit-chat. We wanted to share with you this amazing video produced by the guys at ITO World (our friend Chris aka @osbornec works there): it’s “a visualisation of the northern European airspace returning to use after being closed due to volcanic ash”.

Visualisation by ITO World and Ideasintransit, flight data by FlightRadar24 and map data by the awesome OpenStreetMap.

We recently entered the new Fred Perry “Tell us your story” competition. Their new micro-site is all about real people sharing real stories, and some are really great stories.

If you fancy supporting us by giving us your vote, you can do so from within our entries, here and here. You will find the “vote” option at the bottom of the post.

On a related note, I had the pleasure of being a guest on our friend Lolly‘s blog BlogTillYouDrop, where I talked about this very social media campaign. Check it out, and make sure you read the rest too ’cause she knows what she’s talking about.

On a non-related note, tomorrow we’re off to sunny Sardinia for the Easter festivities, and to see Cagliari – AC Milan. More about this in the next days!

Last saturday we went to carphone warehouse and did it. It has been a while we were talking about getting ourselves an iPhone, and now, with the release of the 3GS, we decided to finally take that step.

As you know, we are really interested in new trends and online media, networking events and meeting people. But at the same time, I was a fan of the phone that does its job of a phone, that allows you to call and text people.

We got the 16g 3GS, and now realise how powerful a tool it is: not just the tweeting (although it obviously plays it’s part), but the syncing of the contacts, the possibility of accessing mail and web on the go, and carry music on the same device. Device that also allows for taking pics and videos and upload them straight away, that allows me to get local reccomendations based on my location, and connect with people nearby.

A device that is allowing me to post this.

On saturday we headed to Richmond, Surrey, to attend TweetCamp at the Gumtree offices.

WTF is TweetCamp?

TweetCamp is an unconference, a BarCamp focussed on, guess what, Twitter. We haven’t really discussed the topic extensively on these pages, but both Gioia and myself are happy Twitter users, as you can see from the sidebar here, on your right, and on the Twitter page of this blog. Our interest towards social networks, social media and the technologies that are around these. Twitter is one of the tools that interest us the most: as you know, we also organised AperiTweat, a Twitter-based meetup (aka Tweetup) inspired by the Italian Aperitivo.

Gioia @ TweetCamp

We never went to an event structured in this way, but it’s safe to say that we overall quite enjoyed the day. Morning sessions included rotating circle-meetings, followed by open discussions set up during the previous chats in the different areas in the offices (which, by the way, are stunning). We met our friends Carmen, Julius and Niamh, as well as new interesting people.

Discussions varied from what we talk about on Twitter, why we use it, and some meta-conversation on what we would like to talk about later in the day at TweetCamp. We engaged in a discussion on the use of Twitter in connection with events. But we could have picked literally anything else: from dairy products to twetiquette (Twitter etiquette, of course), from the future of podcast to Twitter applications. Lots and lots of interesting vibes fluctuating in the rooms.

One of the topics that seemed to be at the centre of the attention was the BBC Save our Sounds project, which is awesome. Check it out, also on Twitter of course. The attempt to make the paper-wiki work didn’t quite go as expected, but I’m sure it has good potential.

TweetCamp paper-wiki

After lunch and refreshments, other circle-meetings took place, and then we got interviewed by Julius for his Event Manager Blog on our experience at TweetCamp. You can find the video in his blog post on TweetCamp.

Only later we got to know that the fun started with drinks provided by one of the sponsors, but we had to leave towards Hampstead, where we attended the first of this year’s series of gigs within the English Heritage Picnic Concerts, with Ray Davies and the Crouch End Festival Chorus, which you will know about in the near future.

A big thanks to Jon, Farhan and Desigan at TweetCamp for organising this.

All images courtesy of Benjamin Ellis on Flickr. You can see many more TweetCamp pics on Flickr.

The other day we headed round the corner from our place to Shoreditchtwit.

It was the first time we went to a Twitter-related event. We’re no new to socials, but this was a bit different. First of all, we didn’t know we were going until about late morning of the same day. I saw a twit by @tojulius, asking what was going on that night. 30 minutes later, I recruited Gioia and we knew we were meeting him and other fellow twitterers at the Austin Gallery, at the top of Brick Lane.

The bar was packed, people were enjoying themselves. It took us some time to find @carmenhere and him but we managed to, and got to know them and @niamhhughes, who joined us later, and have a nice evening sharing our views on mixed flavored topics. We also took some steps forward on a little project we’ll let you know about in due time.

Keep reading us (and them, from the blogroll on the right sidebar, it’s worth it), we’ll keep you posted.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, we’re @gioias and @palmamod.