When Kim, who lives just outside Richmond, Virginia, began blogging about Apple in 2000, the word blog had not entered the lexicon. Creating anything beyond a bare-bones website required programming skills and tech knowledge. Kim, a computer science major at Columbia University, had the know-how. He also knew that almost everyone enjoys an advance look at future products.

He envisioned MacRumors as an aggregator of all the rumours and hints that appeared on message boards and other websites. “The rumour reports have probably been more right than wrong over the years,” he said.

Given Apple’s penchant for secrecy, the company inspires a lot of speculation in the technology industry. Apple enthusiasts dissect every product rumor the way political pundits do political sound bites.

As one of the original websites about Apple, MacRumors was well positioned to become a destination for users and a clearinghouse for gossip. MacRumors “knows more about Apple than Apple management does,” the blog 24/7 Wall St declared last spring.

The site placed MacRumors No 2 on a list of the “25 most valuable blogs”, right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, PerezHilton.com, and TechCrunch. Two of the other tech-oriented blogs on its list, Ars Technica and PaidContent, were sold earlier this year, reportedly for sums in excess of $25 million.