Sap Ag

Brian Willis

Shai Agassi

Elmar Dorner

Various techniques are disclosed for accepting preference information from a user, where the preference information is specific to content elements within a media asset, and the preference information is collected while the user is viewing a display of the media asset. These techniques allow a user to change his or her preference information quickly, easily, and efficiently, and to improve the use of, for example, a search engine, a portal page, a reverse-query portal page, or a video (for example, television) display. For example, the user may update/modify a search being performed by a search engine while viewing one of the media assets discovered during the search, without having to return to a search engine home page or a search results summary page.

Interface for collecting user preferences

Methods and systems for dynamically presenting personalized content are disclosed. Articles may be collected, each article having content, attributes of the content, and content metadata characterizing individual elements of the content. The articles may be filtered, sorted and prioritized for each of a plurality of users, leaving an individualized subset of articles for a user. The subset may then be formatted for the user based on a capacity of a system of the user, the system capacity including rendering media available to the user system and/or an amount of presentation space available on the user system. In this way, a user may receive articles which are of the most interest to that user, in a format that is most convenient or preferable to the user.

Dynamic presentation of personalized content

Systems for providing content to multiple users are described, where the systems identify individual content elements within the content, and provide a discussion forum linked to each of the content elements. As one of the users views the content and associated content elements, the user has the option of selecting a particular content element, so as to interact with its associated discussion forum. Thus, multiple users may become viewers or members of a particular discussion forum. The content element associated with a given discussion forum may be included in various pieces of content within the system, such as in multiple articles or email messages. However, users viewing the content elements in any particular setting are all directed to the common discussion forum. In this way, users interested in a particular topic are brought together in a convenient way, without much action required by the users.

User collaboration through discussion forums

Methods and systems for providing personalized information in a variety of formats is disclosed. Articles may be disseminated to users according to the users' preferences. Each article may contain a plurality of content segments, each content segment being contained within a corresponding content block that is labeled as being renderable using one or more rendering media, such as audio, video, image, or text. In this way, users may receive personalized information in a variety of ways; for example, a user can receive customized presentations about particular articles of interest via radio, cell phone, voicemail, television, MPEG player, web browser, or virtually any other type of media player.

Rich media information portals

Methods and systems for generating supplemental content are disclosed. A supplemental content selector inputs a primary article and, based on supplemental content logic that governs an examination of content metadata associated with individual elements of the primary article, outputs a supplemental article. The supplemental content logic may also include a preference of a user or a system capability of a system of the user. The supplemental content selector can be used as part of a portal generation system in which space in a portal page is reserved for the supplemental article. In this way, the user of the portal generation system will be provided a portal page that is likely to reflect the interests of the user.

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Menlo Park, CA, United States of America

Brian Willis