The National Trust are encouraging people to record a day in their lives on their website. Thousands of people in the UK are expected to participate in the project, which aims to create an online archive of people’s diaries in the country.

The project is being called “Britain’s Biggest Blog” by the National Trust, and was inspired by the Mass Observation Archive, which was established in the late 1930s to allow ordinary people record their lives in diaries for future generations.

The trust says that the blogs will create a “fascinating social history archive” of everyday life for future generations.

To participate in the project, people should record a diary of their day, with a word count ranging from 100 to 650 words. They should then log onto the History Matters website and follow instructions on how to upload their diary.

The 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”.

“It would be fantastic if hundreds of thousands of people take up this opportunity for mass online participation … and make it the biggest blog ever.”

The archive of diaries have been stored at the University of Sussex since 1970, but the blogs will be stored by the British Library.

David Cannadine, for the Institute for Historical Research, said: “The wonderful thing about these records is we don’t yet know what it is about them that will be interesting in the future.

“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.”