Patent ID: 7752251

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for exchanging information within a group of users on a wide area network, comprising: serving a topic-specific user interface to a plurality of remote clients over a wide area network; receiving information posts responsive to a defined topic; receiving a plurality of links to respective different remote information resources, each containing information related to the defined topic from certain of the plurality of remote clients, wherein the plurality of links are distinct from the information posts; updating the topic-specific user interface to include the information posts and the plurality of links; updating the topic-specific user interface to include user-interface objects associated with respective posts or links, wherein the user interface objects are configured to enable users to rate the relevance of respective ones of the information posts and of the plurality of links to the defined topic; receiving user ratings from the plurality of remote clients responsive to the user-interface objects; aggregating the user ratings from the plurality of remote clients to determine aggregate relevance ratings data; updating the topic-specific user interface so that the information posts and the plurality of links in the topic-specific user interface are displayed in a ranked order according to the aggregate relevance ratings data; serving the updated topic-specific user interface to requesting users; and receiving preference information from respective requesting users, wherein the preference information specifies a threshold aggregate relevance ratings data and wherein the topic-specific user interface includes ones of the information posts having aggregate relevance ratings data that exceed the threshold and does not include ones of the information posts having aggregate relevance ratings data less than or equal to the threshold; wherein at least some of the method is performed by a suitably configured computing system having one or more computing devices.