it's 2014 out there. Does anyone know how often is the pagerank recalculated these days? You don't need to wait couple months, do you?
From my experience, its not only up to number of backlinks. Last time my PR raised up it was last year for 2 of mine blogs. And you guess what ? I didn't perform any link building or SEO. I had less than 10 backlinks and maybe only 1 or 2 at most were BlogRoll/ sidebar links... all the rest was forum profile links where I was an active member. Well works for me, even without any SEO because those blogs were not prioritized by me.
It is very hard to say. Sometimes even few good backlink increase your PR and sometimes google penalize your even you have hundreds of backlink. All you need to get some Quality and relevant Backlink. You can check this page for more information http://www.verticalmeasures.com/linktoberfest/index.html
I think you post content on 10 top hit web 2.0 like wordpress.com and blogspot.com and get comment on relate blog, You will get easy PR 1 in next update.
No rules definitely. Google will most likely bypass your website on first PR update if its new. Then after you get some visitors and if you have good content on your website they will reward you with on next PR update. That was my experience with two new websites without hard link building.
Sherlock Strikes Again with 26 Link Building Episodes on Blackhatworld's Most Successful Link Building Thread ...