Reddit announced an open source version of its popular news aggregator service this evening, and we’ve launched our own version of the service, called TechCrunch TechNews. Links from any news source can be added, we’ll leave it up to the community to filter it up or down.

This is to take nothing away from Reddit itself, or Digg, Hacker News or the other dozens of news aggregation sites out there. We just want to see the news that our own community thinks is most relevant, and Reddit just made that incredibly easy for us.

We put this together pretty quickly this afternoon, and it is still on one of our test servers. Over the next few days we’ll get the details sorted out.

Here is a (completely unwatchable) video stream from the Reddit party tonight where earlier tonight they announced the new product, and the launch of TechNews.

http://qik.com/player.swf?streamname=4458f969df8b45eaa92c6c4f1df31582&vid=106949&playback=false&polling=false&user=techcrunch&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous