Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Miles Kronby

Pierre De Vries

Suze Woolf

An electronic magazine is distributed electronically over a network (e.g., Internet) from a publisher to multiple subscribers. In an initial timeline navigation screen depicted on the subscriber's computer display, articles are graphically represented in a graphical user interface as article boxes overlaid on a background. A marker is added to the article boxes to indicate that comments to the underlying article have been published as part of the magazine. To view the various comments for a particular article, the subscriber activates the article box to launch a second screen which includes the selected article box positioned prominently, and one or more graphical comment boxes indicative of the commentaries surrounding the article box. This second screen thereby provides a message thread of articles and related commentaries. An alternative approach to building a message thread is to launch a pop-up graphical list window from activation of the selected article which lists related commentaries. To submit a commentary on an article, the subscriber locates a file containing a previously drafted comment and drags a file icon representing the comment file to a submission target on the magazine's graphical user interface. The subscriber drops the file icon on the submission target which causes the computer to automatically send the comment file, along with identification of the article to which the comment relates, over the network to the publisher. The publisher can then review the commentary and at their discretion, add the commentary to the magazine or discard it. A time line showing the temporal relationship of when articles and commentaries are published within a publishing period is also provided as part of the graphical user interface. As an indicator is moved along the time line, the graphical article boxes are added to or removed from the screen to demonstrate which articles were published at which times within the publishing period.

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Miles Kronby