Perception versus Reality?

It seems like a there are a lot of Mac people out there doing weblogs. Far more than seems reasonable given the market realities (somewhere south of 5% of the installed base). What the hell is going on?

I was trying to lay low about MacWorld, just sort of ignore its existence, which I've been doing for the last couple of years given that I'm not really doing Mac development any more (when I'm working on any of my projects, they're going to run on Solaris, I just happen to have most of it running on my Mac's). Tuesday, I couldn't avoid it. Everywhere I went, there was another link to an article about the announcements and further analysis, or just another article. I gave up.

In part, this seems driven by a bunch of geeks who are intrigued by Apple, even if they aren't yet Mac users. Further, the technical press (which did just about everything it could to ignore Apple in 1996; or worse, write them off) just can't get enough.

Take all that into account and it's still not enough, not nearly. There is something else happening here and I just can't see what it is. Somehow, the voice of the web seems to have learned to appreciate Apple. Note that I didn't say that they used or loved Apple hardware, I just said that they seem to have learned how to appreciate its special place in the world. And that is a tremendous win for Apple.