Ivo Dawnay, Communications Director
The National Trust

It is the early hours of the 18th – the Day after One Day In History – and still I am overwhelmed by the excitement of the day and unable to sleep.

Can it really be only three weeks ago that I sat with colleagues in a small London office and asked the million dollar question, simply: Is this thing doable? I remember asking at the time how many diaries my mates thought we would get.

“1,200,” said one.

“No, we could get 5,000,” an optimist countered.

I secretly guarded my private target of 50,000.

Tonight, the latest report from the office suggests we have already passed 30,000 blog diaries received with two new ones arriving every second. Tomorrow, we should easily pass 36,500 – the equivalent in little more than 24hours of 100 years of history, received by computer in a matter of a few hours.

When the idea first came to me, it didn’t feel like a ‘eureka’ moment. The History Matters campaign – a coalition of heritage and history organisations led by the National Trust and English Heritage – wanted to do something that would catch the public’s imagination.

Something that would make them stop for a moment, look up from the iPod, the computer, the TV and contemplate our lives in the context of time. Something which reminded people that their present was future history and that our priceless historic environment has a value in our present little understood by the quotidian short-termism of our political masters.

Mass Observation, the social history archive at Sussex University, had conducted similar experiments in the past but with tiny samples of written diaries – spidery green ink on lined paper. If we could harness the power of the web, maybe, just maybe we could have something huge – a vast digital collage of a dynamic society in an age of great uncertainty and change: an invaluable resource for historians one hundred, even three hundred years hence.

I had noted that it was the small things that made these collected people’s diaries interesting. In the early 1960s, for example, I had spotted the fact that everyone rich and poor had watched the same TV programmes – impossible to imagine today.