If I could suggest, the link farms provide exposure to wide numbers of people, but they are far from the most fertile ground for such efforts. The readership is generally looking for sensation and TOD rarely provides it. Here you tend to find little bits of jigsaw puzzle, being slotted together. Nothing to compare to some cheezburger cats.

Instead you need to target efforts, in two dimensions. You need the gateway articles that explain the context for a dimension and provide links to previous more detailed work. You also need to focus on certain groups: politicians, business men, scientists, householders, motivated students and pensioners. Each has a particular reason for being interested in the subject, and each tends to be addressable via significantly different mechanisms to digg and reddit.

As well as targeted articles on this and external sites, there are other mechanisms to drive interest: videos (youtube), myspace & facebook, online quizzes, competitions, interactive calculators & apps, even wallpapers and logos have their place. Like it or not, the question you are asking is one of marketing - and there are many methods to doing that cheaply and effectively.

Above all, I would suggest you need to bring structure to this site for the visitor, allowing them to smoothly transition from a gateway article to wider and deeper understanding. That's not really there at the moment since the metaphor is that of a linear blog.

To have the impact you seek you need to truly understand the targets you have and the routes to them. You have grown outside the confines on a pure blog, you need something more enabling and to harness the social efforts that are possible from your readership.