One big site vs multiple small sites

"page" rank vs "site" rank

[rfung]

I have 2-3 ideas that I'd like to develop - and I implemented 2 different websites. But with my 3rd idea, I thought, hey why not just add a link from one of the sites( it's somewhat related) and this way I can benefit from the PR from the original site vs building it from scratch?

What are the views regarding a big site with several 'sections' vs multiple small individual sites (which would probably be somewhat linked between each other).

This brings me to the next question - if SE's rank *individual* pages, then is there really any point to looking at a site as a whole? would a 1 page site rank any better than that same page in a multiple page site if both pages were linked the same (except the 1 page site would in effect be linked/backward linked to an 'external site', but the page-as-part-of-a-multipage-site would benefit from the internal crosslinking.

I'm leaning towards building my 3rd site as an extension of one of my previous sites - it seems easier to benefit from the PR from the original site(and the backlinks too) vs having to build it from scratch. The only negative to that would be if somehow the topic(keywords) of the site as a whole would dilute the topic of the additional section.?

Help!..:)

[mat]

I know it's a tease, but there was a good thread about this in the Supporters Forum a few days back:

One big site vs. many little ones? [webmasterworld.com]

Can't really say there was a consensus, but a lot of people favoured the eggs-in-multiple-baskets approach, some (myself included) prefer the make-one-site-bigger-and-better take.