FWIW there is a small but growing push towards "lifestreaming" - the equivalent of a very detailed, nearly real time diary of the things you are interested in, do online, etc. Lifestreaming applications allow you to aggregate the various aspects of your online social life including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and so many other sites into a single place. Friendfeed, Posterous and Tumblr are good examples of this. Once it's there, the aggregated stream is almost certainly available as an RSS feed (or can be converted to one); that RSS stream can then be pulled down quite readily into relatively "keepable" formats such as XML, RSS (itself an XML dialect), comma-delimited files, or lines in a database. And of course once the information is there it can be indexed, searchable, etc. to provide better access to the information therein. 

This does not address in any way some of the sensory or cultural benefits of physical diaries, just noting that it's not as messy and complex as Larry describes to retain e-diaries or their analogues. 

Re: books, there are several services that will take outputs from social media services such as Twitter and output them to book and/or e-book format. Whether you'd actually want to do that or not is a significant question, but if you're using these services as a form of diary or journal it's doable today and will likely become easier as there is more interest. 

Respectfully submitted on behalf of myself and no other company, organization, association, entity, or board of directors,

Jesse Wilkins, CRM, CDIA+, ecmm, emmm, ermm
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(303) 574-0749 direct
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jessewilkins 

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