[phlogiston]

I always liked the basic idea of simply using forums as blogs/journals and have set up a couple on alternativenation.net for tour diaries from a member there.
(example link)

It's not great but as an example of what inspired this thread it fits - it mainly just suited the quick set-up and needed integration for our New Posts users at the time though!

For 3.5 I've taken things a bit further using just the plugins and have almost managed to set up a system of one forum = blog for every user - filtering & sorting the thread results by userid. I think that would be much more practical than adding a forum for each user, a halfway house between completely no hacking and a fully fledged journal system add-on.