Milan is seemingly populated by many of the best dressed, best looking people on Earth, and last Thursday they were out in force to toast one of the best looking watches, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. Thanks to a kind invitation from Audemars Piguet, 00/24 was there too, champagne glass in hand, along with Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody, Formula 1 driver Jarno Trulli, AC Milan footballer Maxi Lopez and, of course, AP senior management led by CEO Philippe Merk. Also present was Evelyn Genta, wife of the Royal Oak's legendary designer Gerald Genta, who sadly died last year.

I'm a bit of a social media enthusiast - you'll find me on Twitter talking about watches and other things at @TimTomato - and the latest craze in this arena is the website Pinterest. I wasn't sure quite what use Pinterest would prove to me, until I hit upon the idea of using it to gather interesting watch images. So I've started by uploading the images of every single watch I tried on and snapped with my iPhone at BaselWorld this year. On Twitter you'd put the #womw hashtag with this for "watch on my wrist".

Today I've seen some terrific watches from the likes of Fortis, Maurice Lacroix, Hublot, Bulgari, Oris and more. In amongst all of that, I held in my hand for a few minutes this piece - the most expensive watch at the BaselWorld Fair. Made by Hublot, it's a Big Bang set with 1,200 diamonds, and costs a cool $5m.

I'm one day into my BaselWorld stint, but two parties in already. Last night there was a smart dinner on the Louis Vuitton boat, but before that a huge knees up with TAG Heuer to announce the Hollywood star Cameron Diaz as the brand's new ambassador.

BaselWorld Watch Fair officially kicks off today, but for many in the press things got underway yesterday. I had a few meetings, and went to a couple of parties with TAG Heuer and with Louis Vuitton in the evening. The highlight was a meeting with Patek Philippe to see the watch which is the exclusive cover story for the new issue of 00/24 WatchWorld, out today: the Ref 5204 Split Seconds Chronograph with Perpetual Calendar.

You can generally count on the French to show impeccable good taste, and so it proved at last night's Oscars where Jean Dujardin, star of The Artist and recipient of the Best Actor award, was sporting Jaeger-LeCoultre's tremendously suave Memovox Tribute to Deep Sea watch. Released in a limited edition  of 959 pieces last year, the watch is a re-edition of JLC's classic diver's alarm watch, the Memovox Deep Sea from 1959.

Let’s talk timezones – world timers and GMTs. There’s a lot of them around at the moment. If you live in the UK and find yourself travelling a lot to the continent – or anywhere else for that matter – having a watch that tells you the time back home, or in whatever your next destination might be, is a very useful thing to have.

Jaeger-LeCoultre boss Jerome Lambert told me last year that he expects the industry to concentrate more and more on ultra high-end collectors’ pieces with six-figure prices and ultra-limited production runs – such is the importance of super-collectors with the spending power to help brands ride out economic storms. According to people I spoke to, the upper echelon collectors at SIHH were happy with what they saw.

Open worked and skeletonised watches are hardly a new phenomenon, but a striking number of brands were taking this route at SIHH. Most noticeably, Audemars Piguet celebrated 40 years of the Royal Oak watch with a skeletonised, extra-thin version of its design classic and a very smart skeletonised tourbillon model, both in platinum – limited editions of 40 watches each. Meanwhile Piaget continued its slimline odyssey with the world’s thinnest ever skeletonised automatic watch, the Altiplano Automatic Skeleton.

For those attending SIHH the past five days have been a whirlwind of tourbillons, world timers, chronographs, diamonds, precious metals, rare materials, high-tech presentations, parties, models, champagne and walking. Especially walking. The Salon Internationale de la Haute Horlogerie is an endless loop of cavernous beige hallways inhabited by watch industry powerbroker, their minions, collectors, brand reps, publicists and whole armies of journalists. You need sturdy shoes.