PDC starts in less than 4 days (or 3 if you include the pre-conference events) and it has not officially sold out yet.  They have reached their 10,000 registration goal (that’s $20M+ in revenue!) and plan to take registration up until the first day if it doesn’t go over capacity.

Some people may be surprised that it isn’t sold out at this point.  I’m wondering if the secrecy factor and the burn-factor from Vista’s first exposure at a PDC (WinFS anyone?) had an effect.

10,000 is a great achievement and there are carrots in place to encourage people to go to the event, including overtures of attendee-only content on free hardware.  I for one don’t have time to divert my attention to a week someone else right now.

While the bread crumbs have been laid out in principal about what will be talked about, it’s not yet clear what virtual attendees (that’s you and I observing from a far) will get.

Mix 08 was a great experience at a distance and my experience was that it was possible to keep up, if not stay ahead of those people immersed in-person.  Mix sessions were available on-demand a pleasingly short, though not impressively quick amount of time.

The first Keynote (of 4; 2 more on Tuesday and 1 on Wednesday) is at 08:30PT/11:30ET on Monday, but there’s no mention of a Live webcast.  I hope this is made available, as to not have it seems like somewhat of a cliquey shun, and they do have $20M+ in revenue to help cover it, plus I’d happy to pay $200 for full live access to a live keynote, live track switching, on-demand events and on-the-day download availability.  If they put together a Silverlight site of mammoth (albeit with underwhelming branding) streaming site for NBC Olympics, PDC should be a breeze.

A quick google search doesn’t reveal anything for a PDC keynote webcast.

In the meantime, if you like being teased, check out the PDC08 tagged videos on Channel9.

UPDATE 2008/10/24:  According to a response from Microsoft’s PDC logistics provider, they will be streaming the keynote and sessions within one to two hours of their completion at the PDC website.  I guess they are holding out for as many last-minute registrations as possible before publishing the details of live/on-demand resources.