World of Apple
I secretly enjoyed the matter-of-fact approach to reporting of confidential seed notes. Sill: can you recall, was any other public outlet as leaky?
Oddly, I don't recall ever having heard of World of Apple before you posted it. Something seems vaguely familiar but I just can't recall for sure. During the first half of the previous decade, Apple news sites sprang up almost weekly as Apple and/or Steve Jobs was in the news just about every day. At some point I ceased tracking them down and bookmarking them because they became too numerous. As someone with an historical bent, I still revisit the sites (or memories thereof) from the oldest times, just to remind myself how much things have changed, or not at all.
As to your question, Think Secret was usually the one that I found the most leaks at. However, back in the late 90s the one I went to was Robert Morgan, who at various times ran something called "Apple Recon for Investors" or "RFI". He allegedly was very close to the old Silicon Valley personalities and apparently knew a lot of phone numbers. RFI seemed pretty omniscient during the period around 1996-1998, burning out sometime close to 1999. It resurfaced in "Phoenix mode" a year or two later as "Pelagius/RFI" under the parent holding company Echo 4 Communications. It only lasted a very short while before going to sleep again. If you're skilled at poking around on old text sites you can jump in here and take a look. Its an interesting read, as it consists of extremely skilled dissection and very pointed references to things that actually ended up happening, interspersed with bits of stuff written in "rumor-speak" almost like Ryan Meador was ghost-writing for him. Fans of the old MacOSRumors will know what I'm talking about: "Just a few days away from MacWorld New York, we can finally take the lid (slightly) off the box and say that if reports we're receiving are true, Apple has some major announcements coming. The people involved have been working around the clock to get this ready, and if everything goes well, it will be a game changer. We can't get into specifics without revealing our sources but..."
In other words, we have no idea whats coming but we want to make it seem like we do. Contrast that with the extremely prescient statement from November of 1997:
"If you have read all of RFI's Special Reports over the past several months, or even just the past year, you will realize that the future of computing is the "Mobile & Distributed Computing Environment". Rhapsody is a key to this future as it addresses most of the concerns that a lot of people have about this movement."
And today mobile devices and cloud services have eclipsed the personal computing "movement" that brought us to this point, and "Rhapsody" aka Mac OS X was what drove it for the Apple users.
Rumor has it (and how appropriate its a rumor and not confirmed) that Robert had heart troubles or some other related issues, and that he couldn't keep up with the business. He may or may not be around these days. Somebody is paying the bills on that server, though.
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