Reddit doesn’t link to enough Australian technology news and views. So Delimiter decided we’d start our own technology news Reddit — with hookers and blackjack! In fact, forget the technology news Reddit!

Ever wished there was a dedicated Australian technology news aggregator like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News or Techmeme? Today LeMay & Galt Media — the company behind Delimiter — is granting that wish with the launch of Delimiter’s first sister site, Delinker.

Like sites such as Reddit, Delinker will aggregate the best content from multiple publications online into one central repository of links. Unlike Reddit, however, Delinker will solely focus on content that is about technology in the Australian context.

It’s taking Delimiter’s motto of “Just Australia. Just technology.” to a whole new level.

While Delinker is a sister site of Delimiter, the site has no special relationship with Delimiter. Readers are encouraged to submit links to Delinker from any mainstream or niche publication, blog, forum, Twitter account, Flickr posting or even a link to a talkback item on another site. The sole basis on which an article will make it to Delinker’s front page will be the number of votes it gets.

When we decided to setup Delinker, we were aware that a number of other technology aggregators already serve the Australian market. First and foremost, of course, is Whirlpool — a massive site which continues to be Australia’s largest aggregator of technology content.

However, Whirlpool predominantly publishes news and views only about the telecommunications sector, and there is no easy way for its users to vote stories up and down for inclusion on the site’s front page.

Reddit also operates a sub-reddit for Australia. But again, this aggregator is fairly broad and includes any news from Australia – not just the technology sector.

There are a couple of ways in which Delimiter will stimulate community interest in Delinker. Firstly, every Delimiter story will be submitted to Delinker after being published. In addition, every day Delimiter staff will submit stories to Delinker which we think are top stories from other sites.

The Delimiter Twitter account will no longer link directly to stories on Delimiter. Instead, it will link to the same stories on Delinker. This way, you can choose whether to vote those stories up, to try and get them onto the front page, or bury them completely by voting them down.

The Delimiter Link Blog — which has been using our forums to distribute links to readers — has been a bit of a failed experiment — it was unwieldy from the start and too complex, so we’re going to stop using it as an avenue of distributing links to readers.

Like all web sites, Delinker will continue to be a work in progress.

After wrestling with a number of content management systems (including Reddit’s open source code), we’ve finally settled on the relatively new Hotaru CMS to build Delinker. Hotaru is an actively developed open source CMS which runs on standard platforms such as Apache and the MySQL database.

As Hotaru continues to be developed and gains new functionality through its extensive plugin architecture, Delinker will continue to be developed further and evolve to meet the needs of readers. If you see a feature that we need, get in touch and we’ll take a look at the idea, poke it with a stick and likely implement it.

Let us know what you think of Delinker!

Image credit: Matt Groening/Fox

Related posts:

1. Introducing the Delimiter Link Blog
2. Why I’m starting Delimiter
3. Our first Delimiter sponsor
4. Android starting to dominate Optus sales
5. Is $80,000 the new IT starting salary?

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1. Simon Reidy
   Posted 29/06/2010 at 12:55 pm | Permalink | Reply

   You had me at hookers.

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 29/06/2010 at 12:59 pm | Permalink | Reply

     Ah, the easy sell.

2. Lachlan
   Posted 29/06/2010 at 1:43 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Great idea!
   Out of interest, how do you plan to moderate links that aren’t Australian tech specific?
   Could be a lot of work when the site gains momentum

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 29/06/2010 at 1:48 pm | Permalink | Reply

     I think it likely it will self-moderate, if I see any particularly annoying users, I will ban them temporarily until they get the idea.

     • Darryl Adams
       Posted 29/06/2010 at 1:52 pm | Permalink | Reply

       Watch Darryl get banned in 4, 3, 2….

       • Renai LeMay
         Posted 29/06/2010 at 2:37 pm | Permalink | Reply

         Cannot confirm or deny ;)

3. Robotic Buttocks
   Posted 29/06/2010 at 3:34 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Do you have a toolbar/browser shortcut button for submitting any story from anywhere? Maybe someone with wikid javascript skills like dvsdv can whip one up.

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 29/06/2010 at 4:06 pm | Permalink | Reply

     There is a plugin for Hotaru CMS which lets you do this — actually a couple of plugins. They’re in here somewhere:

     http://forums.hotarucms.org/forumdisplay.php?18-Plugin-Downloads