That's How It Happened

How are people using their popular first-name domain names?
Rather excitingly www.rufus.com has recently expired, leaving it open to a virtual landgrab. I have dreamed of owning that domain for almost a decade. It prompted me to do a little (rather superficial) research into other first-name domain names, using the list of popular baby names:

www.jacob.com: cryptically owned by John Jacob since 1995.

www.joshua.com: a real blog, belonging to one Joshua Wachs.

www.matthew.com: a really dull parked page.

www.michael.com: even worse, an inactive page.

www.andrew.com: a dull Georgia IT company.

Trawling down the list, things don't get much better:

www.robert.com: a family of Halal butchers.

www.nicholas.com: another generic parked page.

www.james.com: a firm of web consultants.

www.charles.com: more software developers.

www.justin.com: another custom parked page.

How did the vast majority of these potentially iconic pages come to be practically contentless? Presumably they were once owned by keen early adopting nerds, so how did they get grabbed by faceless companies? Is it more appropriate to buy a .net or a .org as an individual? And more importantly what can I do to secure www.rufus.com?