Well you have a lot more control over how you make the links if it's your own websites, so that's a pretty big advantage. That's kind of the point of link silos. But if you want it to be effective you need to make sure the sites have some value. You'll still need to do a lot of backlinking to them as well, so you're still back to making a lot of backlinks on other peoples blogs, forums, social networks, bookmarking sites, article directories, etc.
You definately want to make websites of your own to place backlinks on, but you're limited in scale on how many you can make right. Placing backlinks on other peoples websites can be almost limitless in how much it can be scaled up.
Basically you'll get the best results if you do it both ways.