Linking together unrelated sites will help your ranking a bit, but obviously not as much as getting incoming links from related sites. It is definately worth doing, but is not a substitute for genuine reciprocal linking.
Sprinkling cross-links throughout your pages is usually much more effective than taking one page on each site, and packing it full of links. That way, it won't look like you're running a linkfarm.
-- Jeremy Maddock SEOMix.com - Search Engine Optimization Tips My Blog - Business, tech, and politics from a webmaster's perspective
You always want to make sure that your own network is well integrated with links into the sites of the web before you link your own network too tightly.
If your network stands out too much by being too isolated, the value of interlinking could be zapped by these links being deweighted or penalized.
It's very helpful to 'seed' PageRank to a new site with links from within your network, that will help you be able to make link exchanges in the future. (I don't necessarily agree with basing link exchanges on PageRank, but it's a fact of life) It's a good general rule of thumb to keep your in-network links to a smaller number than your out of network links, speaking of both inbound and outbound links there.
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