Fascinating week in the PR blog world, capped for me by the Communitelligence PR Online Convergence in Los Angeles. Three days of immersion in blogs, podcasts, virtual reality, social media, SEO, RSS, and other acronym-laden digitas left me wanting to totally unplug and deeply converse with a cedar tree, which I am now doing. Oh, the wisdom and peace of nothingness.

This business of PR can be numbing. You sit in new business pitches and they go something like this: blah, blah, blah, I want to be on the cover of BusinessWeek, blah blah blah, I want to be in the Wall Street Journal, blah blah blah, get me on the Today Show. I long for the day when media relations as we know it can be eliminated from the equation and account execs and MSM can sigh relief.

That’s why I am so fascinated with PR online convergence. It makes the business fun, adventurous, and egads, an intellectual exercise. There is much to figure out, the landscape is constantly shifting, there is no single answer, and we have to become real communicators, not simply glorified (or undignified) publicists.

We got to access some great talent at the conference – Katie Paine, Phil Gomes, Linda Zimmer, and others – and we were treated to a new breed of entrepreneurial entertainment in the form of Jason Calacanis, whose new passion is, appropriately, Texas Hold ‘Em.

Of course none of this can hold together without a deft ringmaster. Conference chair Steve Schwartzman, founder and chair of iPressroom Corp., was able to meld all this info together by relying on two anchors: show, don’t tell; and make the business case. In order to implement new media PR strategies we usually have to convince a skeptical gatekeeper who holds budget approval. What’s the bottom line in all this online PR stuff. Show me how it works. How do you measure it?

Curiously, I did not detect one attendee from a major PR firm at the conference. It will be very interesting to see how far we advance by next year’s conference.

Quick scan around the hood: Steve Rubel offers a week of interesting posts, including video of Robert Scoble scanning his RSS feeds and deciding what news to pay attention to. The video is obviously done with a cheap handheld with no editing. Half the time you see half of Scoble’s head but it is engaging and intimate. If there is one criticism of I have of PR Online Convergence it is that only the high end solution was explored and discussed when actually there are very cheap ways to create audio and video news.

Strumpette reports that 5WPR has staffing problems. How shocking. I never understood the fascination with Ronn “I’m-growing-as-fast-as-I-can” Torossian and his go-go at any cost strategy. Why would a prospective client be enamored with an agency impressed with its own stratospheric growth when that usually means: poor service, high turnover, over reliance on publicity, a setup to a fall. You can only be “fastest growing” for so long, especially when you’ll take anything to get you there. Whenever I see Girls Gone Wild I think 5WPR. That’s great branding if you want to make a name for yourself in the porn industry.

Mark Rose is editor of PRBlogNews - a web publication focusing on public relations practices in the digital age.