There is always a lot of talk in the SEO industry about what types of backlinks are the most effective for SEO performance. Obviously good permanent dofollow contextual links on actual high PR pages is what we would all like to be getting. But contextual links can come in a few different varieties whether they be from longer articles, blog post, permanent homepage, press releases etc...
I tend to use both articles and blog posts in my strategies but for maximum effectiveness I like blog posts. If you utilise a good network they generally start out on actual high PR pages before dropping off to the front page after too many posts are on the homepage of a blog. If you can index them quickly they work very well. The downside to it is that to keep the good PR ratings on the links you will continuously need to be adding more posts and so it goes in a cycle. With articles they will generally be on a low PR actual page (but there are a lot of good high PR article directory domains) until you add some good links (in much the same way as you could do to the actual URL of the blog posts) or have them grow naturally. Both methods work by having a lot of different articles/posts on good sites but the instant advantage of the high PR on a good blog network with low OBL's on the homepage is what I like.
Obviously I never rely on either of these two types of links and link diversity is always the best SEO strategy. Continuously building good links over a long period of time will always be successful. Blog posts tend to give me an almost instant SERP increase after indexing.
What are your thoughts? Which method do/would you prefer to use and why?