Well below the upper crust of bloggers and outside the walled gardens of MySpace and Facebook, there are millions of smaller bloggers who use their blogs not to break news, or count RSS feeds, but instead, to chronicle their lives and offer amusing anecdotes.

While my Web intake is dominated by those discussing technology, politics and sports, there are a few friends who I've enjoyed seeing crop up. Some, I knew offline well before they went online. A pair here are keeping the personal home page alive whom I've never met but feel I know well.

Today, we share half a dozen in no particular order...

Tony Chung at http://www.geekwhat.com/
Main Topics: Music, Apple, Movies and What to do After College?
Can't Miss Post: 12:59AM, Reflection on College

Jonathan Crawford at http://web.mac.com/crawfordblog
Main Topics: Life In Israel, Baby Number Two on the Way
Can't Miss Post: Israeli Independence Day

Nicole Johnson at http://s490.blogspot.com/
Main Topics: East Bay Living, Camping, and Bad Nutrional Tips
Can't Miss Post: Stupid Hippie Company

Jeff Narduzzi at http://jeffanddarcy.blogspot.com/
Main Topics: Sports, Travel, Movies and Friends
Can't Miss Post: Bosco Heads to Santa Rosa for the Long Weekend

Farrah Walker at http://farrahspot.blogspot.com/
Main Topics: Men, Dating, Media and Celebrity
Can't Miss Post: Speaking of Betrayals

Bonnie Wren at http://bonniewren.com/
Main Topics: Games, Family, and Her Bulldog
Can't Miss Post: When Sitting Goes Wrong

My hat off to each of the above for sharing their lives with us and staying interesting enough to keep watching. More to come soon.

This afternoon, speaking with a colleague, I was asked "Why do you blog?" It wasn't a challenge, per se, but one of curiosity. I found it easier to deliver the story of why I started than why I blog in the first place, so it probably makes sense to outline why I feel it's important for me to blog. While this issue is a common meme around the blogosphere, I've not yet taken it up.

First, it's easy to disqualify reasons why I blog.

1) I don't blog in hopes to make money, show ads or supplement my income.
2) I don't blog with specific goals in mind for number of visitors or comments.
3) I don't blog to increase my personal brand to draw attention to myself or seek employment.

But there are some main reasons why I do blog.

1) I blog to make my voice heard, join real-time conversations and enable change.
2) I blog to share my experiences and opinions for today and tomorrow.
3) I blog to share my personal passion for sports, technology, politics and media.

Contributions to how I started this blog include:

1) Having the louisgray.com domain name for almost a decade.
2) Finding that my interests outgrew my family's narrowly-focused blog and that I needed a new audience more likely to appreciate my comments and join the conversation.
3) Enjoying the technical wrangling necessary to wholly own the blog platform experience.

I blog because the world is rapidly changing right in front of us, and I want to chronicle what I am seeing and how it affects me. I blog because I believe the traditional barriers between location and time zones are being torn asunder by real-time communication and information sharing, and that my true peers who share my interests and enthusiasm are easier to reach by keyboard than by telephone. I blog because I enjoy writing, and it's good practice for any job, present and future.

I blog because I have found blogs to be the very best way to enable change and exchange ideas. The very best way to reach a software vendor or Web service provider is not to use the telephone or to e-mail support. It is to blog. If you mention them by name, or their product, they will find you. If you complain loudly enough, they will hear you. If you proclaim a product, service or activity to be the best on Earth, you can help others learn why and lead by example.

I started this blog in early 2006 because I finally had found a way to implement a blog, using the louisgray.com domain, without having to get outside of my geek comfort zone. I had started and stopped blogs in 2004 and 2005, but shut them down as I could never reach the medium and presentation I was looking for. But since starting louisgray.com and posting consistently in a big way, I have made my voice heard, for more than 800 posts, at a rate of nearly 2 per day, sometimes more, and occasionally less. I haven't seen millions of visitors or thousands of comments, but I have established a comfort zone with those I know visit often and share their opinions. I see companies open dialogue where there was none before, and I have made friends and acquaintances who I may never meet, but would love to.

I don't have ads on this site. I'm not morally opposed to ads on blogs, but I don't want them on this site. Anybody can be bought for the right price, of course, but I don't think they make sense here, and I don't like the way they would make the site look, either in appearance or in the way the site is interpreted. I don't write my posts to get them on Digg or talked about by A-List bloggers. If that does happen, it's a treat, but not the target. I don't do keyword or search engine optimization, and I don't use viral marketing methods to artificially increase my Technorati rankings.

I blog because I am an enthusiastic fan of Apple, of TiVo, of the Oakland A's and Sacramento Kings, the iPod and iTunes, a student of the evolving Web, with new approaches to software, communication, finance, business and media. I blog because I am a sponge in Silicon Valley, eager to use the latest services and learn from those who have had more experience. I blog because I want to partake in the conversations for change and for driving what is next.

I blog because I want to learn from you and talk with you. The floor is yours. Let me know. Why do you blog, and what should I do differently, in your mind?

Turns out the missing feeds and trends data in Google Reader will look more like a blip than a calamity, as the company rapidly responded and restored all previous data in about an hour after customers first started noticing their RSS feeds and shared link statistics had been obliterated. I went back from having only 4 feeds to 190, and my trends data shows 400 shared items in the last 30 days, not zero. This gives us incredible relief, and reduces our level of frustration which hit mid-day.

Some circles define the Web 2.0 movement as being where the Web functions as an application. Instead of photos being stored on iPhoto, they can be stored on Flickr. Instead of Outlook, e-mail is on GMail. Instead of using NetNewswire, we use Google Reader. And while the portability of data from computer to computer and browser to browser is excellent, it does raise the fear that my data is outside of my immediate reach, and therefore, subject to the security of the third party. If Google Reader has an outage, my data is lost. If my blog platform goes down, I shut up for a while. And so on.

So what should we do? The common answer seems to be: Back up your data. After today's outage, many Google Reader users rapidly backed up their OPML files, in case it happened again. But there are a ton of companies out there actually offering backup services through the Web, from Apple to Google (GDrive anyone?) and others. What if those services go down? Are you S.O.L., or will a simple user agreement bail you out when the time comes? You honestly can't be too safe, or have too many backups of your data.

I absolutely appreciate the speed in which the Google Reader team responded to today's data meltdown. They even just posted a note on their official blog about the outage, which they called "brief" and within the "response time that we strive for". But before we saw this post, we genuinely thought our data was nuked and that we would have to start over, and that feeling was uncomfortable indeed. It's amazing how reliant I've become on the Web to give me my information as fast as I can get it.

Looks like I wasn't the only person affected by a massive bug that hit the Google Reader RSS application this afternoon. More than just my trends data being wiped out, which I noticed right away, the site now shows I only have four RSS feed subscriptions, and not my normal 189 or so. The site's been going in and out over the last half hour, and if not remedied, it will have shockwaves throughout the blogosphere, directly impacting some of the most vocal RSS advocates on the planet.

Others are also seeing the issue, starting with Brian at The Faithful Skeptic, BlueFish, who notes the major hiccup, Nathan from Nerdflood, Mike from A Geek's Point of View, Josh Kim and Rachel of the Liminal Librarian.

How do I know all these folks were affected? Google Blog search, of course. Google strikes Google, I guess.

Whatever the updates are for Google Reader, assuming they ever get the site going again, better be damn good, or a lot of vocal people are going to be very pissed.