I agree, this would be an excellent addition.
Did any of you ever play the original Myst? There was a notebook that came with the game to jot notes, to help you get think and mull over things when you get stuck.
This would certainly help with the quests, so that you could write down what you have done so far. \"Pages\" in the journal would also be very helpful, because then you could have a page for monsters, several pages for quests, etc.
Perhaps there would be a default journal size that you would start with, for example, say, 50 pages, 30 lines a page, 30 characters a line. I think that this would take about 43K on the server. And then, later, for not too high of a price, you could by a bigger journal, 100 pages, 40 lines a page, 40 characters a line. This would take about 156k on the server.
And so on, so the real writers could buy bigger journals, while the people who barely use this would not. Also, you could use a compression algorithm, or maybe even just a blank space compresser, to save space.
And your journal would be attached to your character, or perhaps your login, for we should have the ability to have multiple characters under one login. The journal could never be looted and never be seen, unless of course you cut and paste something to tell your friends.
Perhaps we could even have a couple of \"log\" pages, where it would automatically log things, to your level of verbosity, such as \"I have killed 32 crabs\" or, if you want it more detailed, \"I killed a crab on January 3rd, 2005, at the Hydlaa plaza, coordinates 123,542\".
I think that this would really help with roleplaying and questing.