Hamilton Nolan takes a blunt look at the Spanish Olympics basketball team (men’s), and its terrible sense of humor. If only we had the PR Play this week…

As part of its 10^th anniversary celebration, PRWeek is honoring one of the most important technological advancements in content distribution of the past 10 years: the blog. The celebration comes by way of a competition. PRWeek personnel selected 16 of its favorite blogs, and ask each of those bloggers to select another blog to nominate for this competition. You will find the logos of all 32 blogs here and a bracket of the competition here. The competition will be a single elimination tournament, voted on by you, the reader. The tournament will take place over five weeks. For the first round, we will introduce eight new blogs every Monday and Wednesday. Bloggers have agreed to participate in the tournament, and were allowed to promote their participation on their blogs and elsewhere.

For the uninitiated, the single-elimination tournament will consist of 16 first-round contests, each of which pits two blogs against each other. Whichever blog gets the most votes will move onto the next round, to face another blog that received more votes than its competitor in the first round. This will continue through subsequent rounds until one blog is left.

We have a PRWeek Twitter feed these days. You can follow us at Twitter.com/prweekstaff. During the seven minutes a day it works. Kidding!

PRWeek hosted its annual Consumer Roundtable, last Thursday, in Chicago, along with a panel discussion featuring Audrey Reed-Granger, director of PR and marketing, mass brand portfolio at Whirlpool; Jeff Davis, SVP and partner at Fleishman-Hillard; and Julian Green, senior media relations manager at MillerCoors, and moderated by PRWeek’s Erica Iacono. The panel event was sponsored by Fleishman-Hillard.

Iacono led discussion on the direction of integrated branding in the face of the rising costs of consumer goods, PR professionals’ increasing share of the marketing mix with the slashing of advertising budgets, and the shift in agencies having more strategic relationships with their clients.

The panelists raised several interesting points. Reed-Granger commented that business is down overall, and that she knows when advertising is being cut at her company, because her phone starts to ring. Green explained how Miller beer is thriving in the current soft economy due in part to the High Life Delivery Guy spokesman campaign. And, Davis’ assessed that PR professionals are continuing to work hard to provide steady service, despite the setbacks of the economy.

I was hoping to keep it a surprise for some time, but someone got a little overzealous (Thanks Richard!). PRWeek recently held a luncheon roundtable with four legends in this industry: Al Golin, Harold Burson, David Finn, and Daniel Edelman. The transcription, as well as an amazing photo shoot, will be featured in an upcoming, special issue of PRWeek. Our Web site will feature podcasts and videos from the event. We were honored to be in such rarefied company.

If the PR industry needed any further proof that developing digital capabilities is essential to its future, the results of this year’s PRWeek/MS&L Marketing Management Survey make a loud and clear argument. Of those surveyed, more than 75% expect their companies to increase budgets for digital/online initiatives, and digital/online is the last area of the marketing mix that they would cut if forced to because of economic conditions. The accompanying article offers examples of companies that have truly embraced this space, and the value they’ve found in doing so.

Jaimy Lee joins PRWeek from the San Diego Business Journal, where she covered healthcare, energy, and education. Prior to the Business Journal, she spent two years writing for Copley Press in San Diego County. You can reach her at jaimy.lee@prweek.com.

Steve Cody has an interesting blog post on how one prospective employee got his attention.

Hats off to Matthew O. Waters of Doylestown, Pa. Matt read my blog about the dearth of hand-written. Letter letters from Gen X and Gen Y job seekers and, yes Virginia, sent me a lengthy, handwritten note with his resume….

Good for you, Matt. You’ve not only differentiated yourself, you’ve gotten a blog written about your iconoclastic ways.

Video from PRWeek’s technology roundtable in San Francisco

Listen to podcasts from the technology roundtable.

Click here for part one, and here for part two.

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending the Arthur W. Page Society dinner, where I discussed trends with the industry’s luminaries. Irascible former Mayor Ed Koch gave the keynote speech, which went over well. He clearly knew his audience, tailoring his comments with thoughts about interacting with the media (claiming, probably correctly, that he was never scared of them) and communications issues related to health scares. But the audience didn’t seem to know itself, or didn’t care about Koch’s thoughts on the industry, because the Q&A session featured questions about whether or not he would run for President, what he thought of the actual Presidential candidates, and this thoughts on immigration. The latter question led to a odd seven-minute-or-so monologue about illegal immigration.

In actual news, everyone was raving about the Fareed Zakaria keynote. Zakaria is, of course, editor of Newsweek International and author of The Future of Freedom. His talk, per the Society, was about “the impact of globalization on business, economy and society.” For more thoughs on Zakaria’s conversation, check out Peter Debreceny’s commentary on Arthur Page Society’s new blog.