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Scott Karp attempted to coin a new term on his Publishing2 blog today: link journalism. "Link journalism is linking to other reporting on the web to enhance, complement, source, or add more context to a journalist’s original reporting," he wrote. Links as journalism is something that Karp has been writing about recently; it ties into new media and citizen journalism, and it is something that we think warrants a closer look.

This is guest post by Dan Zarrella, a social media marketing consultant. You can follow him on Twitter here.

While some people have said that Digg has begun to lose its relevancy since the recent algorithmic changes, I believe it still represents an incredibly rich resource for studying social media and how stories and links spread throughout the web community. Once a link "goes popular" and is listed on Digg's homepage it is seen by many and perhaps even a majority of web geeks. Very often these readers have their own blogs, and if they like a story they may blog about it or link to it. This is why many webmasters yearn to be Dugg -- not for the first wave of traffic, which is often substantial but hard to retain, but for the viral wave of traffic and links that comes as a result.