I’m placing MetaKiller (not the best name) on The Best Visually Engaging News Sites — tentatively. It appears to be brand new, and it’s not quite clear to me if it works or how it works.

It has a very engaging and accessible design of multi-colored blocks that show a headline, a summary of the story, and a link to the whole piece.  I especially like their summaries — most of the other similar sites only show the first couple of lines and not an actual summary.

The site says by clicking on the “X” in the corners of the stories if you don’t want to read them, that it “learns” what stories you’re interested in and can recommend better ones.  If it indeed does that, it will only work on the same computer since there is no way to register or sign-in.

One potential nice option is that readers can add other storiess, and summaries they write, to the mix of articles that are shown on the site.  It’s unclear, though, how it’s determined which reader submissions are included.

All-in-all, I think the sites really has some potential for being useful to English Language Learners and others.  I just hope they refine it further.