A digital time capsule detailing a day in the life of hundreds of thousands of Britons is to be posted on a website and then archived permanently at the British Library.

The actors Stephen Fry and Sir Derek Jacobi, the writer Bill Bryson and television historian Bettany Hughes are among those who have already agreed to record their experiences this Tuesday for the “One Day in History” project organised by the National Trust (NT).

The idea is based on the burgeoning phenomenon of blogging, in which everyone from anti-war campaigners to call girls, and from police officers to government ministers, as well as thousands of ordinary people, jot their experiences and thoughts on personal websites.

In the NT project, described as a “blog for the national record”, contributors are asked to write between 100 and 1,000 words about their day, in English or Welsh.

“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,” said Fiona Reynolds, the NT’s director-general.

The trust is urging people to “reflect in their diaries how history itself impacted on them that day — whether it be simply commuting through an historic environment, discussing family history, watching repeats on television or listening to mum’s incessant 1980s pop”.

Pupils and staff at 29,000 schools have been invited to contribute, including those at the Dubai British school where pupils will blog about expat life in the Middle East, but anybody with access to the website www.historymatters.co.uk can sign up.

According to Technorati, a blog search engine, there are at least 57m blogs around the world which are regularly updated — and the “blogosphere” is doubling in size every six months. A third of blogs are written in English, a third in Japanese, 15% in Chinese and the remainder in other languages.

The NT’s idea was inspired by mass observation exercises set up by sociologists during the second world war — and still continuing today — to record the details of daily life. In the latest survey, started in 1981, 400 people across Britain are recording everything from where they watched this year’s World Cup matches to their view of “core British values”.

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