wheel - 11:14 am on Apr 1, 2009 (gmt 0)

There's two ways to look at this. One is that by linking out you're telling Google what your site is about and placing yourself in the neighbourhood of those great sites you link to.

Two, is that you're leaking.

The second, leaking, has numerous threads here indicating recently that stopping the leak helps their rankings. The first way, I've never seen anyone say that it's directly impacted their rankings.

So, I don't like it, but the emperical evidence seems to say that you should stop the leak.