Prompt's TechBlog

The National Trust is today inviting Brits to contribute to what it is calling 'the biggest blog in history'.

National Trust director general Fiona Reynolds told the BBC: "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."

The project is responding to widespread concern that while daily life has never been better documented, most of today's blogs are unlikely to outlive their creators. The blogosphere will doubtless be here in some form in a hundred years' time, but any blog documenting today will likely have perished. The forest lives on, while the trees within it eventually die.

So there is a role for a project that gathers a slice of daily life and preserves it for future generations, warts and all. This, sadly, is not it.

The biggest problem is that the National Trust has not been bold enough. It is sanitising the historical record at the point of creation, outlawing content that is racist, sexist, political or 'offensive or misleading in any way'. What that last part means is anybody's guess. I'm not convinced I'd consider the National Trust to be the best judge as to what will offend people today and in the future, though.

For the record to be historically useful, the right of free speech should trump any concerns about political correctness. By banning swearing, the National Trust is effectively stifling how people may express themselves or some of their views. Banning politics, as if it didn't matter to everyday life, is patronising in the extreme. The National Trust is also insisting that under-18s get permission from their parents to contribute, which is way out of touch with the MySpace generation.

There are some legal oddities too: firstly, the copyright licence requires contributors to hand over all rights in their work to the National Trust. If we really wanted to preserve this data for future generations, you'd think a creative commons licence would be more useful. Secondly, contributors must agree to a stiff clause saying they will indemnify the project's operators from any legal fees they incur as a result of a contribution. I can't see what benefit people receive in return for taking on that open-ended risk. Thirdly, contributors must waive their moral rights, which exposes them to the risk being misrepresented.

The concept is flawed by two things: firstly, the fact that the only blogs that are recorded are those entered at the project website, which means contributors know they are supposed to be writing for the historical record and will change what they write accordingly. Secondly, contributors are urged to write about how history has impacted their day, which will lead to many contrived and meaningless contributions.

Meanwhile, millions of ordinary people all over the world will have an ordinary day today. There will be joy and sadness. There will be excitement and drudgery, success and failure. Much of it will be blogged, without restraint and with passion. If we could archive a cross-section of the real blogosphere today, that truly would be valuable to future generations. Just don't tell anyone until it's been safely preserved. We wouldn't want to skew the record.