If you only accept fresh original content/ articles on your Article directory or blog but do not do any link building at all, would your article directory or blog still be able to get PR?
Not at all - you need incoming links in order to gain PR - you'd have to either link to them from other sites or encourage people to link to them in order to build the PR of the individual articles. Cheers Jason
Google's PR formula is a back link formula. So you have to have links to your site to get any PR. The basic formula gives PR to your page based on the PR of the other pages linking to you. The more pages that link to you and the higher their PR the higher your page rank will be.
The most important thing though is not pr.. its serps. You want to get traffic man and the only way to do that is with search engine traffic and that happens through links. So more importantly get links to get traffic.