It seems that Siemens has recognised the power of blogging - they are offering a chance for people to test-drive some of their new phones, and to report their experiences in a blog format.

It'd be interesting to see how this works out for them - the chance to listen to your customers during a beta test is nothing new, but this is the first time I've heard of a company using a blogging format to structure such feedback.

Testers will release their opinions on a blogging platform, which will be an integral part of the Siemens Communications site. Individual tester blogs for each product will be aggregated and linked to from the product pages within the next generation section. After the release of a phone the posts from categories like "Bug", "Idea" or "Hack" will stick to the product´s page.

If you are interested in signing up you can have a look here.

I've just come from a job where the ambulance crew who responded called me 'Mr Blog' - they wondered if I'd write about the job we were at.

18 year old male, normally fit and healthy, with a dry cough for one day. Location? 400 yards from the hospital.

Erm...and that's it - Cue a phone call to 999, one RRU, one ambulance and all the work/paperwork that any attendance to A&E requires.

Before that I went to a patient who gave their complaint as 'Chest pain', and sat there talking to me, rubbing their ample belly, which had been hurting them for the past week. I'm sure some people think their chest is the two inches around their belly-button.

I've mentioned before how some addresses are 'flagged' as dangerous, when a crew goes to an address and gets punched, kicked, spat at or otherwise abused they return to station, fill in a form and that address is then flagged.

We will still go to these addresses, but the police will normally be called first, we then wait around the corner until the police turn up and we go to the patient together.

The police have a similar system, but it's much wider in scope, and we don't have access to it because we are an 'essential' and not an 'emergency' service.

When an address shows up as 'flagged' the crew are informed that they should wait for the police to turn up...

...So why then, did I turn up to a flagged address, have a chat with the patient, and then, a couple of minutes later, I opened the door to the police and the ambulance crew? Could it possibly be because no-one told me it was a flagged address?

I heard the crew being told that the address was flagged, and that they shouldn't approach, but as I didn't know what call they were going on I couldn't have known that it also should have applied to me. The FRU desk which handles my jobs should have told me about the address and given me the same advice, but that didn't happen.

At the end of the day, I was alright (the patient is well known to me, if only because he is a neighbour of mine) - but when I called the FRU desk to ask why I wasn't told about the dangerous address the best answer I got was a 'Sorry about that- are you alright?'.

I know it gets busy up in Control (especially last night - everyone was busy), I also know that communication between the Sector desks (who control the ambulances in the area) and the FRU desk (who coordinate the RRU's across the whole of London) is often not brilliant - but this is the sort of thing that could lead to really bad things happening...

...bad things happening to me.