Livre d'Or

Yes, I agree that LJ and DW are pretty good for meeting new people as well as just bulk-adding all your friends who are already here. They make it natural to find friends-of-friends, and the communities work quite well for finding people with common interests. DW is better than LJ for finding interesting new people in that you can subscribe without giving access to your locked posts, and in general there isn't so much of an expectation of reciprocity. But it's worse than LJ because the community scene just isn't active here.

I think Google+ is probably aiming for something similar but really it's 10 years behind. The "sparks" feature is as far as I can tell basically useless, there are no community-equivalents, and when it presents you an undifferentiated list of everyone you've ever emailed and everyone who has a visible connection to any of your connections, there's little incentive to sort through the mess and find people you actually want to connect with.

LJ/DW are still person-centered, in that each blog is controlled by a specific individual who sets the tone and content of discussion. And the culture here is that people talk about whatever random shit comes into their heads, very few journals are topic-focused in the way that more mainstream blogs often are. Compare, say, Usenet, where you have newsgroups based around a given topic (specific or general, depending), and anyone can start a new thread, and even within a thread, there is no particular weight to being the "OP"; moderators were completely separate from who started the discussion.