About PageRank Leakage

A few minutes ago I stumbled upon a blog post about "pagerank leakage". This is actually my first time to hear about such a term. The bottom line of this pagerank leakage thing is that out-going links are always a bad idea for SEO because it creates what the SEO community call SEO hemorrhage. In short, outbound links bleed off good PR. It is said that "somewhere in Google's webmaster guidelines is a warning about having more than 100 outbound links on a page." It means that 101 outbound links on a page could lead to an immediate decrease in absolute PageRank even if it's not demonstrated in the toolbar." SEO is still a mystery to me despite the number of hours i have burned reading books about it. But I think this idea of PR leakage is somewhat faulty, I could not believe it. If bloggers will take this seriously no one would be linking out to other blogs and sites because everyone would think that his pagerank will suffer if he puts an outbound link in his blog. All bloggers would think of ways to get an inbound link while making sure not to get some out. The blogosphere will become a very unsociable place. Whoever conceived of this PR leakage thing was probably just making some funny joke but people are taking it seriously. Every blogger is aiming for a higher pagerank and of course when you hear something like this you will be affected. But before we get affected by things like this, we must look at it from many angles to see if it could hold truth. What is the PageRank of Wikipedia? I guess it is 10, I havent checked it out though. Now, how many outbound links does it have? Probably thousands. Where would PR leakage figure in this? Linking is the very essence of the internet. I don't think that Google is so crass as to count my blog's outbound links against my blog. A blog with more links is more useful than a blog with lesser links. SEO is a mystery to me but I don't just believe is ideas as short-sighted as PageRank leakage.