National Trust completes mass blog day

For ever, for everyone

Will Head, vnunet.com 18 Oct 2006

The National Trust yesterday moved out of bricks and mortar and into the online world with it's latest project involving a mass blog.

One Day in History, part of the History Matters campaign, aims to collect as many blog posts as possible into a mass blog to achieve a national record.

The date was chosen deliberately as a supposedly ordinary Tuesday of no particular national significance.

The aim is to create a huge electronic snapshot in words of everyday life at the beginning of the 21st century to be stored in perpetuity as a social history archive.

Serial self-promoter Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of EasyJet, has already put his considerable bulk behind the project.

"When I set up easyInternetcafe as the world's largest chain of internet cafes I was trying to play my own small part in bridging the digital divide, and I am glad that millions of consumers still use them every year," he wrote in his entry.

"I hope too that we can now help the History Matters campaign by allowing anyone who wants to join the mass blog and leave a diary of their day for future generations."

Celebrity supporters of the project include Stephen Fry, Bob Geldof, Bettany Hughes, Sebastian Faulks, Tony Benn, Bill Bryson, Derek Jacobi and Tony Robinson.

Every school in the country, all 29,000 of them, has been invited to take part in the event.

"The wonderful thing about these records is that we do not yet know what it is about them that will be interesting in the future," said Professor David Cannadine, postgraduate supervisor at the Institute for Historical Research.

"It may be that historians in the future will be amazed that on 17 October 2006 we were still eating meat or driving privately owned cars!"

The blogs will be stored by the British Library as a permanent record of national life.

"It would be fantastic if hundreds of thousands of people take up this opportunity for mass online participation on 17 October and make it the biggest blog ever," said Fiona Reynolds, director general of the National Trust.

"We want this day to have its own place in history and be a snapshot of everyday life at the beginning of the 21st century."

Members of the public can add their entries on the History Matters site.