Every year Microsoft runs an event called the PDC (Professional Developer’s Conference, which is a crucial aspect of their communication programme for developers. Developers are a very important community for Microsoft as the more applications which take advantage of the Microsoft platform, the more money MS makes from the core technologies and the greater the company’s hold over the desktop. The real challenge, therefore, is to reach out as much as possible to widest audience, something which a physical conference, itself, can’t do. PDC Bloggers is a very interested experiment in extending the reach. MS has set up some infrastructure so that attendees can blog the event in real time and reach a potentially huge audience at the same time. Worth a look. And worth thinking about for our events…

Rex Hammock reports growing support for a Pulizer Prize nomination for the Times-Picayune breaking news weblog – which would be the first time a blog had been in the running.

Hurricane Katrina Timeline is a wiki set up to help people collaborate on a record of the disaster. It has a precident – the 9/11 Timeline which is still going thanks to public donation and participation.

Wired News has an interview with Arrianna Huffington whose site, The Huffington Post, an experiment in citizen journalism, in its first month had 700,000 visitors. It now has 1.5 million readers a month looking at 10 million pages.

Reuters reports that Wikipedia, already the most popular reference site on the web, is overtaking many news sites in traffic terms. Hitwise says traffic has gone up 154% over the past year. I know Wikipedia isn’t exactly a blog, but it’s in the same category, so it’s interesting…

In the tech world it is now quite commonplace for people to set up a tag on Flickr for a conference or gathering of some kind and for participants to post pictures of the event, such as these of Microsofts Professional Developers Conference 05.

PaidContent.org has an interesting account of developments in “community publishing” in the US.

InformationWeek is running a story about the impact that blogs are having on b2b media.

Micro Persuasion has some good tips for bloggers.