Mark this down as a Great Moment in Journalism: Kashmir Hill, a writer at Forbes.com, has just written a blog post in which she exclusively quotes source’s Twitter feeds, rather than using traditional quotes obtained by contacting sources directly.

The post, funny enough, is an analysis of a recent Wall Street Journal article that charges Facebook with transmitting its users’ personal information to advertisers and Internet tracking companies. (Side note: this is news, still?) Hill examines the Twitter streams of several tech experts and media types, noting how they reacted to the WSJ piece via Twitter. Here’s a typical paragraph:

The family of late New York Mets prospect Brian Cole finally gained closure after being rewarded $131 million by the Ford Company in redress after the star was killed in an Explorer crash. In the mainstream media, that’s where the story ended. To find the real story– that this exact accident has occurred in about one in 500 Explorers manufactured– you’d have to go to Twitter.

The October issue of Publishers Weekly is quite forward-thinking for such an old world product. One glance at this edition’s cover — an artistic recreation of the magazine’s Twitter page — and it’s clear that this isn’t your great-great-grandfather’s Publishers Weekly. Actually, it’s the Viral Issue and it’s online and on newsstands now — what’s inside might surprise you.

How much is your Facebook page worth to Facebook? Probably a few hundred dollars, according to a Facebook app, Viral Loop, that’s collecting data as it is promoting a book of the same name. How much are celebrities’ pages worth? For many, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

In anticipation of his new book Viral Loop about “the interconnectedness of today’s socially networked society,” Adam Penenberg (Fast Company, Wired) has commissioned the design of an eponymous Facebook application to test his thesis. Described as part “infographic, game, and research project” Viral Loop estimates what slice of Facebook’s billions are all thanks to your activity on the site.