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.