About this blog

There are lots of different types of people and groups involved in the product safety / injury prevention space: companies, whether they be manufacturers or retailers or test labs or consultants; regulators and governments and inter-governmental organizations; a variety of non-profits (from advocacy groups to standards organizations); journalists, academics, individual citizens and groups of individuals. It's my view that no one entity or select few entities owns this space. This issue is too important for people to be worrying about silly demarcation lines. Sometimes there are areas of overlap, and that's fine, because we all bring different perspectives and abilities when looking at different issues.

For me, I am just a blogger, an amatuer and individual citizen, doing this in my own time.

This is not a blog about policy issues. Other than this one post - I plan to keep commentary and expressing view points to a minimum. The focus of this blog is just on bringing together information about product safety fails which is already published. I think that there is value in doing this. I have a particular interest in shedding light on safety issues where a product is recalled or withdrawn from sale in one country but not in another. I'm sure there are reasons why this happens, and some of them may be good. But I'm not really interested in the reasons why it happens, I just want to know that it did. If I buy something and hear that it's been recalled in the EU, but not in my country, I want to know of this and I think that other people deserve to know as well.

Caveats: I am just one person, doing this in my own spare time. There are so many product safety fails, that there is no way I can cover them all. I make no apologies for misses. Given my limited time resources, I will make judgment calls about which issues to pay attention to and which issues I won't. On occasion, I may be wrong and will not notice an issue which becomes really big. If that happens, I expect myself to be open about any changes.

The relationship between the blog and the Twitter account: It's my idea that everything I consider will be tweeted first. The blog is where I focus on bringing together the disparate bits of information onto the one page. Thanks to the blogs' search, archives and categorization functions, I hope that the blog will eventually become a useful information resource, in a way that a Twitter account could never be.

Feedback: I welcome feedback, whether in the public comments or in a direct email to me. My email address is whenphonesexplode (at) hushmail.com , or click on the link at the bottom of the left-hand navigation panel.