Microsoft's academic-community outreach site, The Spoke, has been operational for a while (we wrote about it back in December last year). On Tuesday, Microsoft published what seems to be its first official press release about the site. The Spoke allows participants to host blogs and communicate via message boards. It also now offers students only deals on discounted software from Microsoft and third parties. The first offer is for Visual Studio .Net Academic version, which students can obtain for $25 by signing up as "Premium" Spoke members.