feeling listless

Weblogging The author Simon Garfield has a book coming out shortly Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain:

"In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where remarkably most remain unread." -- Amazon synopsis

Blogging is an obvious successor to this on a mass scale. In a hundred years historians will be able to look back at this time and be able to understand how people felt and what life was like in an unprecedented details (baring mega-war or asteroids). So with this book in mind it isn't surprising to see Garfield's photo peeping out of one of those creepy little windows in The Observer this morning accompanying a great little article about what I'm doing right now. Some of the usual suspects are namechecked but the piece generally introduces readers to everyone else:

"If you want to know what ordinary, literate and computer-savvy people are thinking and doing today, you can wait an age for the mythical great British novel or you can speak to a random sample of strangers on the phone, but it's simpler to log on to the UK Blogs Aggregator to find that last Thursday between 9am and 11am, 66 people had updated their blogs with recent news. These included the sites Rogue Semiotics, funkypancake, holygoat, the Coffee Grounds, Foe Romeo, Linkmachinego, My Deep Thoughts and Memetank. Among them you could find observations on loud phone users on trains, the Today programme's April Fool, the new Batman film and the killings in Fallujah ('Why are these people being called "defence contractors" and not mercenaries?')."

Wonder how long it will take for Garfield's piece to turn up on Blogdex ...