Ophan is the newest addition to The Best Visually Engaging News Sites. It shows a slow-moving and multi-colored moving “stream” of news items (the headlines and the beginning of the story) which you can click on to go to the primary source. If you register and sign-in it provides a personalization feature which helps the application “learn” what kinds of stories you’re interested in. Soon, it will also have a similar streaming feature for queries you type in a search box.
My English Language Learner students have found many of the sites on that “The Best..” list pretty accessible — much more so than I would have thought. It’ll be interesting to see what they think of Orphan.
Thanks to Read Write Web for the tip. They’ve written two posts on the tool.
June 3, 2009 at 1:33 pm
When I visited orphan, I was prompted to allow orphan to access information from my gmail account and then asked to give them full access to all of my contacts. Pretty sneaky and unethical.