I don't see any real differance between a cloud and a link farm. Large number of unrelated links on one page with no content. Why would the search engines view them any different?
that depents on the outgoing link count . if there are so many outgoing link, it will not effect your page rank . if there are too many outgoing links (i believe this number is 150) , Google will consider it as a links farm
they would give you some pr, pass on some to you, but not too much, if ur site is one out of a thousand links, expect very little results.