It’s not quite as simple as that, though. You can’t just blog anywhere; you have to use the History Matters One Day In History site. You must also agree to their Terms and Conditions and waiver copyright to your blog entry, which can be used by the British Library in published works, media etc. as pointed out in the blog form’s footnotes:

Your diary will be stored in electronic form in the British Library’s Web Archiving Section which is a part of the Modern British Collection.
Members of the public will be able to consult your material.
The History Matters partners own the copyright of any materials that you submit and be free to use them in any History Matter related materials such as any media stories, published books etc.
Please see the Terms & Conditions for further details as to the use(s) of material submitted to ‘One Day in History’.

Now, I’m no Cory Doctorow, but I care about the overuse and downright abuse of copyright law to benefit the wrong people. I’m sure that the History Matters project thinks it’s being really revolutionary by having “one of those new fangled blog things”, but is playing the same insidious All Your Posts Are Belong To Us game that I would expect of major media organisations like NewsCorp.

The second old-economy mistake that HM makes is centralisation. There is no need to force people to use the ODIH (sounds like “oh dear”; well, it is made using an ASP CMS) site; RSS and other open data standards, combined with tagging (tag=odih, for example), would have made it perfectly possible to have a decentralised blog day effort. This could have been harvested by archive.org or the British Library after the event, in case the original blog posts went bit-rotten over time. If the bloggers used a suitable Creative Commons license, then their posts could have been repurposed as derivative works by the HM project and the British Library.

I can understand why the ODIH blog operates in the way it does: centralisation lowers the barrier to entry for people who probably don’t have a blog to speak of. Raise the barrier too high, and you won’t get the participation required to make the event a success. Decentralisation would have meant that the HM project would have had to exercise a degree of trust in the data quality used by the bloggers and their content. However, as they make no guarantee of quality or suitability for the data submitted to ODIH anyway (We may remove any postings or other material or interaction at our entire discretion.), there’s nothing to be gained in that regard by centralisation. It really does appear to be all about the snatching of copyright over the submitted work (If you do not want to grant the Partners the rights set out above, do not submit your material to the Site. Um, OK).

These same people probably don’t exercise themselves about copyright and freedom issues, but may take exception to the handing over of their intellectual property in such an all-or-nothing way to the HM project. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to be aware of Creative Commons and the range of licenses that it offers as alternatives to full copyright.

It seems churlish to advertise this as a mass blog, yet potentially exclude those people who have made blogging so important for the project even to exist: bloggers themselves.

In conclusion, my initial enthusiasm for the project has waned and I don’t plan on blogging via the ODIH site tomorrow. I will probably blog on my own blog though, as a mini-protest against the lip-service paid to blogging by the ODIH site.

As an aside, it would be wise to consider these issues as we enter the Brave New World of community web sites. You have to trust your users, not take away their rights.

• We (i.e. Clive, with occasional help from us & Claudia) started (and pretty much finished) building the conservatory.
• Phoebe had her first birthday.
• After nearly ten accident-free years, we had two minor bumps in the car. First, I pulled into a Cornish field entrance, skidded on gravel and hit a rock. Two weeks later, I hit some metal framework (From a lorry? A tank? A roadsign? Who knows?) on the A36 near Warminster while travelling at 60mph, damaging the suspension arm, floorpan, exhaust and sill. The first bump was knocked out by the garage but the second required an insurance claim, lightening our bank account by £350 (Note to self: negotiate a smaller policy excess next time). Talking of the garage, they managed to completely miss the damage under the car when we took it in for a service, despite the fact that I told them I could see damage to the floorpan and sill. We weren’t best pleased, I can tell you.
• I turned 31. Not in itself notable, but I suppose I’m properly in my thirties now.
• There have been two more Bradford-on-Avon Geek meetups. Photos of the last one are on Flickr.
• Phoebe has started walking; we’re glad we got the stair gates fitted! She can also repeat, parrot fashion, many many words, so Kathy and I have to be careful what we say. She can also say words in a non-parrot capacity, like “milk”, “up”, “down”, “no”, “more”, “please” (Yay! She’s a polite girl!), “bowl” and lots more.
• Kathy has started child-minding, for the child of a co-worker of mine who was in our NCT class. The nice early start means I get into the office by 8am, giving me scope for a lunch break.

So that’s it really (I think!). Work carries on apace: we released another web site back in June; we’re now scratching our heads over the eternal “build vs buy” conundrum vis the way forward. Lead times for new sites need to be reduced, it seems.

• Feedburner smart feed, including Del.icio.us links
• Plain ol’ RSS
• Plain ol’ Atom

Why did I do this? Well, Movable Type’s licensing isn’t as great as it used to be (I would have benefited from multiple authors during our trip ), I fancied a new challenge, and I like the opportunity to have a blank canvas, design-wise, to make this site look like it’s been designed. The fact that the comments can auto-close after a period of time will also help in the fight against comment spam, which only has to be a good thing.