If you are a lover of high end Hi-Fi equipment, as I know the team at Quids Technology are, then check out Dreamtheatre.

Dreamtheatre is a massive database containing detailed specifications on virtually all available high-end Hi-Fi/AV equipment. Awesome for enthusiasts who wish to compare and contrast different models before making an expensive decision. No, its not an online store or some kind of partnership with major retail outlets. Its purely a clean, free information service with the intentions of being useful to people.

Those extraverted java hackers from Atlassian are at it again. Today is their Cutlassian Pirate day. Its a treasure hunt style event where they run around Sydney, dressed like pirates, completing certain tasks off a checklist to receive points for their efforts. A mate of mine, is heavily involved in the action, belonging to the Dirty Long Johns team. I wish them the best of success in today’s activities!

The last I heard was that they were just kicked out of the Google building by Google Security. The Security guy came down and found a bunch of pirates in his foyer and gave them the boot. Who wouldn’t?

This is nothing unusual for Atlassian. They have the most packed social calendar of any IT organisation that I know. Keep up the great work team.

Last week Scevak and the HomeThinking clan launched sister site www.realestatevoices.com.

The site is a user-controlled list of Real Estate related news snippets. Similar sites in different topic areas have recently surfaced, with Digg being the most prominent.

I love the simplicity and relevance of community-driven content. Users of the site can trust the placement of the content - anything that makes it to the top must be worthy, because a lot of people think so.

But the most important thing to get a community site like this off the ground is to give it a rolling start. I have started thriving community sites in the past. The reality is that people don’t want to find an empty skeleton and be the first person to submit content. You need to create a handful of deliberate helper accounts and fill the site up full of user-submitted goodness. In reality, no community site is thriving with activity from day one. But if potential users think it is, they feel more inclined to contribute to something that already appears to have value or placement.

Once your community site gathers momentum, you will never need to login with those fake starter accounts again!

Homethinking.com was launched just the other day by Niki Scevak.

Homethinking is an innovative, new web 2.0 service that guides home owners in making one of the most important financial decisions they’ll ever make..

Who should you choose to sell your home?

When you consider the amount of money involved and the potential consequences from having a bad realtor vs. an ace, the thinking behind the site makes perfect sense.

Niki is based in NYC and the launch of Homethinking has started out locally in beta mode focusing on the state of California. There is already a large amount of data available through the site.

Over time, the amount of information available through the site and the area it covers is going to expand. Niki has gone about this launch in the right way. Don’t eat the whole elephant at once. Get the first geographical area perfect right down to the last detail, then expand coverage later. Its also very wise to launch your internet startups in beta mode as soon as you have the first decent skerricks for your users to play with. Firstly, you are putting a stake in the ground, but you also get critical feedback from your most important stakeholders (your users) before the site becomes too busy and large scale changes become so much harder to smoothly implement.

Scevak is a very capable, long term friend of mine, and I will be watching Homethinking with very keen eyes as I’m sure its going to do well.