As reported in the New York Times , and in what must surely be a rare occurrence in the field of medicine, a doctor in Virginia has actually walked away from his lucrative medical career in order to be a full time blogger. Which just goes to show you that blogging has come a long way since its humble beginnings.

Keep in mind, however, that Dr. Arnold Kim is not your ordinary, everyday blogger, but is the creator of the uber-popular MacRumors site, which attracts more than 4.4 million people and generates upwards of 40 million page views per month. If that’s not enough, Dr. Kim claims that the site has been much neglected and has a lot of room to grow.

Beginning as a hobby during medical school, MacRumors was created in 2000, long before the word “blog” had even entered the lexicon of the computer literate. His background in computer science endowed him with the programming skills to create his website and build MacRumors into what it is today: the hottest gossip site for the much secretive world of Macintosh products.

Because of the clandestine nature of Apple Computer world, consumers are hungry for news about new products and technology, especially ones that are still in development. Mr. Kim has managed to fill that demand by creating a forum where gossip and rumors are traded online. His expertise as well his intuition give him a leg up in sifting through the information and determining what is fact and what is fantasy.

According to the blog 24/7 Wall St. , MacRumors was ranked second only to Gawker.com on the list of the most important blogs, beating out such notable blogsites as the Huffington Post and PerezHilton.com.

To get some perspective, two other tech-blogsites that made the list, PaidContent and Ars Technica, were just recently sold for sums of over $25 million. It’s been reported that Ars Technica gets about 3 million people per month, and PaidContent, with it’s associated sites, gets about half a million. With MacRumors falling comfortable in between, it stands to reason that it is a valuable site, indeed.

When asked about how he generated income, he said it boils down to the mantra of every aspiring professional blogger out there: generating traffic. And generate traffic he does. Along with text advertising, banner ads, and commissions on product sales, his income has reached the six figures level, which made walking away from the lucrative field of medicine that much more plausible, and with the blessing of his father (a physician as well) to boot.

And while bloggers like myself have yet to start pulling in the big bucks like Dr. Kim, stories like this only inspire us to keep the faith and stay the course in our blogging.

In the meantime, I’ll keep my day job, which for the record, is not as a physician.