CompuWorld

No one can deny the fame which the "dream" world of Harry Potter has earned. Same is the reason why the latest launch of Harry Potter movie destroyed all records in its first week itself. J.K. Rowling, the brain behind Harry Potter, has also earned unexpected fame with the book series breaking all the records. Even the new book which is to be launched very soon has already been booked for over a million copies a lot before it comes up in book stores.

These are 'not' the only people who have earned so much fame. There is one more group which you call as "fans of Harry Potter". So popular are J.K. Rowling's stories, and the Web pages built around them, that a handful of online fans have become stars in their own right.

Arguably the biggest is Emerson Spartz, who was just 12 when he set up www.mugglenet.com. Today the site is visited up to 40 million times a month, making it one of the biggest Potter sites in the world and a viable commercial venture.

"I spent the entire summer on the road signing thousands of autographs, which is simply unheard of for a geeky kid who created a Web site," he told Reuters by telephone from the United States, where he is a university student.

"Harry Potter has got to a point where it is so popular that even fans have fans," the 20-year-old added.

Rowling has long recognized the power of the Internet.

Her own Web site, www.jkrowling.com, boasts up to seven million hits every day and Spartz and Anelli were invited in 2005 to hold a rare interview with her.

The author also publicly backed The Leaky Cauldron's campaign to prevent spoilers appearing on the Internet ahead of the launch of "Deathly Hallows", which will answer the question on ever Potter fan's lips -- which characters will die?

One hacker claims to have leaked key plot details on to the Internet after breaking into a computer at Rowling's British publisher Bloomsbury.

Reuters has also seen online photographs purporting to be the last pages of book seven, which, if genuine, provide the answers to the biggest secrets of all.