Balatarin, which means the highest in Persian, is a community website that helps its users to find the best links on the Internet that interest Iranian Internet users around the world. Registered users can post links to interesting articles. Those links initially go to the "recently posted" page. Once a link gets enough positive votes, it is moved to the top of the front page, which provides more visibility.

Users can also bookmark links for their later reference. They also have a profile page where they can include a link to their website as well as post their brief biography.

Balatarin has a completely unique non-conventional credibility system built in that prevents it from running into problems that similar websites such as digg.com have run into. Each user has a credibility that increases over time based on the activities and contributions of the user to Balatarin. The amount of the credibility of each user in turns determines their level of allowed activity in each 24-hour period . This prevents overactive, inexperienced, new users from lowering the quality of Balatarin.

Balatarin features a tag cloud, which shows tags that are used to label posted links. These tags reflect the level of interest of Balatarin users in a specific subject.

Balatarin is the first website in the wave of Web 2.0 websites in Persian. It is written using Ruby on Rails and uses MySQL for its database. It was launched on August 16, 2006. The website is continually being improved. There are currently 15037 registered users and so far they have posted 296480 links to Balatarin. See statistics below.

Unfortunately, since January 2007, Balatarin has been censored in Iran. Users who visit Balatarin.com from Iran are shown a message stating that they are not allowed to access balatarin. This is an unfortunate development even though not dissimilar to the filtering of other social networking sites such as YouTube and Orkut. Because of filtering, our traffic from Iran was dramatically reduced. Only a fraction of tech savvy users were able to return to the site using proxy tools. We in Balatarin have repeatedly stated that Balatarin is not a political website and only a portion of the links posted to Balatarin are about political news. All the link postings to Balatarin are done by users, and the links posted to Balatarin do not represent Balatarin's team. We have worked to provide our users in Iran with alternative ways of accessing Balatarin and circumventing the censorship.

Balatarin has a T-shirt shop. You can support Balatarin by buying a T-shirt.

For more information in English please check the Wikipedia’s article on Balatarin, which is maintained by Balatarin users (and not the Balatarin team)

To contact Balatarin, please send an email to Email

Some Statistics:
15037 Registered Users | 296480 Links | 958486 Comments | 4979206 Votes

More facts about Balatarin:

  1. Last year Balatarin was selected as the best Iranian website of the year by the votes of Iranian Interent users, this year selected as the best social website of the year.
  2. 7Sang, one of the most prominent media and internet magazines in Iran, has chosen Balatarin as the best website in Persian for two years in a row.
  3. Several times Balatarin has been ahead of all the Iranian or International organizations in reporting breaking news on Iran. These were reported directly by Balatarin users. A few examples include: the earthquake in Qom reported only seconds after its happening, the airplane crash of General Ahmad Kazemi, and the mistreatments of women in the police crackdown on women with "improper" attire.
  4. Several online movements have started from the discussions in Balatarin such as "Persian new year without buying a gold fish".
  5. Balatarin has been the source of many news agencies. In one case, a hardline newspaper in Iran, copied and used a comment by a Balatarin user in their reporting without giving a reference which was later discovered by Balatarin users.
  6. Balatarin is a rare place where Iranians of different background, secular and religious, living abroad and living in Iran, or young and old have a conversation with one another. More than 900,000 comments have been left on Balatarin so far.
  7. Many of Iranian bloggers rely on Balatarin for publicizing their articles. Balatarin's 5 million page views is an indicator of its success in bringing a lot of audience for what bloggers produce.
  8. Balatarin also is a place where a number of Iranian popular journalists and bloggers are present and directly talk to their audience.