Linkbaiting is what people talk about these days... I heard it first at the November WMW show from Jim Boykin and was clear about it - however a couple of folks asked me about that - so what's a Link Bait ?

Link baiting (or linkbaiting) is the new art of building a useful tool (the Linkbait), writing an interesting or controversial article, or even running a fancy kind of "event" or contest on your site. With the only goal to attract a lot of links naturally.

or in short: Creating COOL Content that gets digg'ed , slashdot'ted and cited from all over the internet.

Some other recent mentions of link baits:

Matt Cutts / Google engineer - "doesn’t have to be a bad thing"

Jim Boykin - Ceo of Webuildpages

offering 1000$ for a cool link bait idea - because "we suck at it" (linkbaiting)

Link Bait Case Study

One older post from November

Using other people's content as link bait

Measured on the rush for Link Baits and Matt's positive comments on this - that's the future link building deal - build great content* and you will get *great rankings