Since I went freelance about four, almost five years ago, I traded under the name 3rd Eye Photography. I still love it but the creation of this site and I guess.. brand 'Our Man Inside' brought together many of my projects and offerings under one roof.

Our man inside was an old blog going way back. Many of the original anonymous posts have been moved and hidden in another location to protect the names of the innocent. (Mainly me).

As I pack to fly to Jordan in the early hours of tomorrow I thought it reasonable for me to tell my clients I will be away and thought I would also take the opportunity to officially launch this new site and the direction I wish to take for the foreseeable future.

Photography is still my main focus (scuse the pun) and I feel it will always be my main passion. There are so many other skills I wish to expand upon and incorporate too.

I won't write late into the night as I am a little sleep deprived and I don't feel tomorrows flight to the Middle East will be the most conducive for sleep. So I have linked the pdf newsletter I sent out to a few clients at the end of this post.

Should anyone want to contact me from tomorrow night (the 14th) I will be on my Jordanian mobile.. +962 795 316 772 or the usual electronic places. I will warn you in advance though, communication may well be sporadic.

Please click the link to read the PDF..
OMI-rebrand

Tags: 3rd Eye Photography, photography, rebrand, blogging, podcasting, Jordan, assignment

When I wrote this article back in June 2007 I got a few emails telling me to stop being paranoid and just assimilate like everyone else... In fact I got many more emails in defense of facebook than I received in support of my concerns.

Is the tide now turning? Or is there always going to be a miniature backlash against the corporate Goliath's?

Yesterday Jon Swifts blog post came up in my twitter stream posted by Deek Deekster.

It talks of an account closure due to a real name not being used and then a total backtracking turnaround by facebook.
I imagine facebook suddenly realized they were playing with fire by banning a prominent bloggers account and someone in marketing decided it would be better to reinstate it than to face a barrage of negative blog posts as they pop up all over the net. They need your REAL name to collect REAL data on the REAL you. Wouldn't is be wonderful if we all signed up with another account under a false name and used some kind of ip masking to hide our digital identities..

Would this make facebook effectivly worthless?

I have a facebook account but it pretty much lies dormant. I only really signed up to research the phenomenon and to prevent 'Johnny identity theft' from using my name instead of me.

Anybody harvesting data from it would be pretty bored by now. Apart from a few ignored pokes and zombie bites there is nothing really to see.

There are loads of more interesting, less in your face ways to network and yes, perhaps they may all one day all come under the great empirical umbrella that is google, but as it stands today.. Don't add me or ask me to join the 'facebook owns me and my life' group.


I don't spend any time there and I don't miss it.

More Facebook links to browse.. link link link link

Tags: facebook, social networking, orwell, big brother, privacy, internet, twitter, blogging, blog

Well this didn't last very long.

I have decided to put this blog on the back burner. I suddenly realised i wasn't writing necessarily everything I felt I should.

Looking around I can't help but notice the many other bloggers that post their thoughts anonymously. This allows you to get a feel for what the person is really trying to say without any 'look-at-me' mentality seeping in.

In the same way I like to take pictures so I can enter conversations without words, I have decided at giving the anonymous blog a try so as i can try speaking without a face.

Anyone that has read this blog may well recognise it's me on the other. If so, drop us a comment and say hi....

Bye for now.

Tags: blogging, blog

The Government needs YOU to start blogging now! Think about it. At this moment in time, those that run society have a few tools at their disposal to monitor the populous. Whether it be RFiD chips, CCTV, or Menwith hill and it's technological wonders. The private life of the individual is secretly captured, mapped, collected, and owned in effigy by a mass of private business operations—the security industry.

All these methods of collection require continued research and development, massive corporate and private funding and thousands of members of staff.

Wouldn't it be cheeper and easier for all if we publicly told the world exactly what we thought? What if we revealed our innermost fears and dreams in an attractive, easy to read, easily up-datable format?

Wouldn't this serve the government information gatherers just perfectly? All that time and energy saved.

Straight away, the chit chat from little girls discussing about what kind of tattoo/piercing/hair colour they are sporting this week can be filtered from the educated informed and ever so slightly angst ridden masses.

The technology is already in use to read every electronic transmission on the planet, it looks for keywords so the email or blog can be filed and read at a later date. But what the Blog really achieves is the effect it has on making people who really feel like they have an axe to grind, blab their innermost secrets to the world.

No more private conversations. Everything out in the public domain. The diary of a sociopath left open for all to see.

So now, thanks to the blog and all the loyal bloggers out there, the trouble causers and potential revolutionaries can be rounded up. In data bundles at first, name lists and hard drives crammed with tales of people, peoples tales and their anti social thoughts.
Then, in a more physical fashion as groups of people are isolated until they are brought into line.

Think about this next time you are posting your deepest darkest thoughts. Think about it but don't necessarily let it stop you.

Tags: blogging, cctv, surveillance, data mining

I did it...

A whole day without blogging or any kind of obsessive compulsive internet abuse.

It felt good.

There were a few moments last night when I had consumed much red wine and beer and then have a phone call that my grandmother had blacked out on her own, miles and miles away.

I called the doctor and a neighbour feeling powerless and not quite drunk enough to think drink-driving was a good idea.

The doctor had been and gone but I couldn't sleep thinking about how she might be. Even at 3 am when she would be quite obviously tucked up fast asleep, I sat staring at a late night film about people blowing themselfs up.

I needed to write about how much I don't want to grow old. Well.. age i don't mind.. it's the falling apart at the seams and a disintegration of the mind.

Be it cathartic or just plain therapeutic, I am slowly seeing the benefits of the blog.

(It still doesn't tip the scales away from my conspiracy theory though... and of that... more later...)

Tags: blogging, old age, addiction, tv, cathartic

Ok.. Got all my work for today done and dusted by 3pm.. Cool. I have driven up half the country and back to take one photo. Pretty sad really. All that time driving. Still the radio makes good company providing you don't have it tuned into some midless pap DJ who likes to spaz off about himself... Hang on... That's a bit like a Blog on the radio or a podcast or whatever it's called.... Just with more reason to be as you have 8 million interested parties. shit.

That makes this post more than a little pointless. Especially when a sunspot leaps creating an electro magnetic solar storm and erases every hard drive on the planet... It could happen you know.

So now i will impart the self centered information that i have and go run a few errands for myself...

SHIT!... an email has pinged and brought bad tidings...

Tonight i was supposed to be photographing Willy Mason at the roadmender Northampton and for some reason it has been cancelled. .

Man.. i had a back stage pass, photo pass and a fully charged and ready to go camera.

I bet he has got too famous to play the small venues and has managed to find a clause in his contract and pulled out. Well Willy, If you think i will be buying anymore of your cd's you have another thing coming.. This was the reason Aquisition and other P2P software was created. We made you and we can break you......

23:24pm.......oh... Seems Willy has broken himself... Word is he has had a nervous breakdown on this, his first tour. i don't think this is public yet... Not until i hit 'post' i guess. Now there is a dilemma. Second only to whether i should even bother blogging....

Should i click the button and tell the world (that isn't watching) that Willy Mason, sensitive (overly) creative (when he is not too country) popular singer songwriter has had a nervous breakdown for whatever reason...

It's personal for sure.. But when does a singer songwriter ever really keep anything to himself..? You know it will be a song soon enough. A slow melancholic ballard of woe and despair about how being a successful musician is sooo hard. That should earn a few bucks.

Well i am off to write my own song. An angsty emo ballad about how easy it is too let down hundreds of everyday 9 to 5'ers who's only piece of hope this week came in the shape of a small piece of paper costing £7.50 that was their ticket to escape the real woes of their painfully average lives.

Thanks Willy... this one is for you... *click*

Tags: blogging, willy mason, nervous breakdown, gig, radio, live music, photography, podcast

Well... Everyday I wake new and improved web tools are born with promises that they are the best at whatever it is they do.

I still don't know what i am meant to be doing or why i'm even here...

I am meant to be a photographer. Taking pix and building a archive of images.. Every moment on this computer.. using these 'tools'.. is another moment not out in the big wide world capturing moments for all times.

It is such an amazing distraction..

A few people i don't know want to be my friend... A few people i didn't know but nearly do seem to be on here to. Maybe after a while i will know many of the people i didn't, and get to know some of the people i do a little bit better.

Who knows.

Man.. This time last week i was in Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan to be precise. I think i understood my enviroment there more than i do here.

I wonder what percentage of blogs in this world are written by people that have little or nothing to say... Like me... And how many more people actually read them. I think we all have much too much time on our hands.

Buddha help us in the future when all the work is done by robots and everyone and their Gran has a 'blog'.
..........................................................................
June the 23rd 2034...
"Today i mostly read other peoples blogs before deciding to write mine and tell you what little i have actually been doing. I can write so much faster now that i have my 'thaughtwriter®' plugin... Oh how did we ever manage without it.

All i need now are some decent thoughts."
...........................................................................

Ahh... so much to look forward too.

Tags: blogging, web tools, internet, iraq, kurdistan

This blog on www.OurManInside.com is a bringing together web content published and created mainly by myself over the last few years.

The name Our Man Inside was initially associated with a friend I was helping to blog way back when he was finding his feet in the wide world of journalism. I had registered the name with the intention of setting up a private investigation company but since found a much better use for it.

Although i am writing this particular post 'today'.. I am dating it in the dim and distant past, as after this is posted, I will retrieve a few other blog posts collected from other sites I have hosted over the years and re-post them here.

My first proper blog, hit the net on the 1st of February 2002. it was a part of a local documentary project I was working on in the town of Rugby. Due to not knowing much about the importance of backing up way back then, I lost a lot of content and blog posts. So here out of respect and remembrance is my first blog post (that i actually called a blog). As you may well imagine. It is not really that interesting. Just the first step out into a world I was mainly an observer of and now I wanted to participate.

"So this Is Blogging...
I have rarely read them and THIS is only the seventh word i have ever written in a blog. Yup, this is my first blogged paragraph.
Never-the-less i know they are everywhere and everyone seems to think they have something interesting to say.
Me... Well i haven't anything at all to say... Not this minute anyway."

Tags: blogging, web, writing, journalism