Get good page rank by winning awards?

Are incoming links of your category valued higher?

[weaver]

My question is if incoming links to your site from web sites of a similar category as your own site will raise your page rank more than links from sites of any category (assuming the links come from pages with the same page rank). The reason is that I'm thinking of applying for awards, so there could be a majority of links from these sites.
Thanks for any suggestions.

[Jack_Frost]

It's been a popular theory, but I think that the consensus is that links from high PR site with minimal outgoing links are the best (on or off topic). We manage abotu 40 sites and I have never seen much correlation to think that the topic of the page linking to your sit has much value in any search algorithms.