Normalkid:Arnold Kim

This year, MacRumors’ coverage of the Macworld San Francisco 2008 keynote address knocked it out of the park. Reviews were universally positive, and it makes me really proud of what we’ve accomplished.

What makes this accomplishment even more impressive is that we’re a relatively rag-tag crew pulling it together against better funded sites with far better keynote access. No one at MacRumors is a full timer. At present, we’re still a combination of part-timers and volunteers.

In the end, I was unable to get a “keynote” media pass to Macworld. No big surprise — despite our size, MacRumors doesn’t get much recognition from Apple (or IDG). This, however, means that I had to buy my own ticket (Superpass) into the Keynote, and stand in line to get a good seat. Of course, the night before I became nervous about not getting a good enough seat… which means I ended up on the sidewalk at 1am (and I wasn’t first in the Superpass line) the night before trying to get some sleep. I got maybe an hour of sleep before people starting milling about, and I started getting uncomfortably cold. So, I ended up chatting and moving around (to keep warm) for the next 7 hours while I awaited keynote access.

In the end, it was me and Jeff Longo in the Keynote providing updates from mid-way-back seats. We had a volunteer crew at home handling the server side and processing data. But that was enough to provide the best keynote coverage on the web.

I like to think that due to our limited resources, we’ve had to work smarter and harder in order to keep up. We also aren’t restricted by the ever-important “page view” metric that tends to drive the more commercial sites’ coverage. We employed additional servers and multiple Content Delivery Network (CDN’s) to support keynote traffic, but due to our efficient setup, we are able to run it at a fraction of the cost.

I’m sure competition will increase, especially after our success this year, but we’ll continue to step up our features. This year, we added large (640×480) photos, and an iPhone/iPod touch formated site. There will be more to come.

MacRumors.com has developed a unique culture over the years, which is a product of its primary author (myself), I suppose.

MacRumors was never all about the rumors, but clearly, that’s been a big focus of the site. In the early days, rumors were shunned by the mainstream media. This was before blogs took off, and Apple rumors became regular CNBC content.

Instead, there used to be a couple of established rumor sites, and then there was the mainstream Mac web. And apple rumors would never be published on the mainstream Mac web. This all changed in the past few years, seemingly around the time that Apple sued ThinkSecret and subpoenaed several rumor sites. It’s hard to say whether this legitimization of rumor sites contributed to rumors jumping into the mainstream, or if it would have happened anyway.

Regardless, as blogs have become more mainstream, there’s a few gadget sites (Gizmodo and Engadget) which have grown an enormous audience. I’ve personally found the most curious part of their success is the sheer volume of updates. It’s not uncommon for them to have 50-100 posts in one day. Is their traffic simply a side-product of having so many pages for people to view? Or do people really want this much content? Even if some of it, is… well, less than interesting.

MacRumors has always been more of a quality over quantity site. Early on, this was easy, since Apple news and rumors tended to come a little slower than they do these days. This was also because I was never a full-time blogger, so by necessity, I couldn’t update as often.

Recently, I thought, would MacRumors benefit from much more frequent updates? In the end, the answer seems to be “no”. As a side effect of the all my efforts over the years, the site has drawn a certain audience. And a few vocal ones have made it clear that they want quality over quantity and relevant topics on the front page of MacRumors. The front page is also seen as somewhat sacred — with strong objections when seeminglly “unworthy” content appears on it. I realize that this is a direct result of how I’ve treated the front page… protecting it from throw-away stories as much as possible.

I also believe you shouldn’t lose your focus and turn away from your core audience. MacRumors has grown to be the largest Mac news or rumor site on the internet, and I believe the current format has contributed to that growth. I do have plans to expand content and add features over time, but in a way that preserves the essence of MacRumors.

It’s remarkable to see how large our MacRumors Forums have grown. We’re at over 138,000 members and 4.4 million posts, and represent the most active Apple forum on the internet.

I added the forums to the site in 2001. Before that, I had experimented with integrated comment systems for our stories, but these tools were very immature at the time. In the end I reluctantly decided to add a full forum with user registration and additional sub-forum discussion.

I say ‘reluctantly’ because I knew the baggage that comes with launching a forum. Spam and moderation become major issues. I also knew that with me having a more-than-full-time day job, I simply didn’t have the time to police the forums. But I launched them anyway.

As I could have predicted, after a few months, the forums discussions had spiraled out of control into massive flame wars. There would be lengthy threads with people cussing each other out back-and-forth. It was ugly.

In trying to sort out the issues, I recruited a few moderators, banned a few users, and set up some rules to try to prevent this from happening again.

Now the rules I instituted may seem odd 6 years later, but I still feel the reasoning behind it holds true.

While you can read the lengthy rules as they stand today, the cardinal rules remain the same:

- Don’t personally insult someone else.
- Keep discussion on topic.
- Don’t waste my (our) time.

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