Speaking of LiveJournal, the NY Times has an article on A Site to Pour Out Emotions, and Just About Anything Else. It's actually a bit better then I expected. But it does briefly mention online Journals in relation to blogs:
All kinds of people maintain pages on LiveJournal, but the site's own statistics show that its users tend to be 15 to 21 and predominantly female. Many people who have pages at LiveJournal or similar sites like DiaryLand maintain that the form is distinct from Weblogs, or blogs. The journals tend to be more inwardly focused and offer fewer links than blogs, although the categories overlap.
I still maintain that online journals are a subset of the whole blog world. While a lot of the blogs that are popular tend to be full of links outwardly focused, there are also a lot that look a heck of a lot like an online journal. So I still don't feel that it can be considered something seperate.
The article also briefly mentions what I think is one of LJ's strongest features. The ability to have posts that only certain friends of yours can read. I've thought of having some kind of 'friends only' part of my site, but then I'd have to write all the code for it and I'm way too lazy. This is one thing a closed system like LJ lets you do.
