When people talk about "OBL" they're generally referring to the amount of outgoing / outbound links on a page. If you're creating links, you want to try and create them on pages with as little outbound links as possible. (For the most part.)
If you are not selling your website or an article inside, you don't need to pay much attention to OBL's. For your SERP, OBL's don't help or negatively affect!
Actually Matt Cutts has said they reward linking to good sites - my own tests would seem to confirm this (although it's virtually impossible to have adequate controls in this type of experiment).
When you think about it, the entire PageRank system would break down if Google encouraged websites to never link out.