Shortly after I moved from London to Rome in the winter of 2004-05, I started Il Sette Bello, a blog to keep my scattered friends and family updated on my new life in the Eternal City. I didn't realise it would become a form of cheap therapy.
Not long afterwards, my colleague and I, Matthew, started Social Media Influence, a catchy name, we thought, for a daily digest about what's happening in the Web 2.0 world.
During the 2006-2008 academic years, I also acted as executive editor for The Matthew Online, the student newspaper of John Cabot University here in Rome. My journalism students were the staff. They write about all manners of things that touch their lives, on campus and off.
One of the reasons (but not the principal one) I left London for Rome was to be closer to my second love, a little stone house in the mountains of Le Marche, a region in Central Italy. How'd I get mixed up in the Italian real estate market? Long story. The truncated version is here. And yes, I rent the place out from time to time. Details are here.