Patent ID: 6839680

Claim:
A system for profiling users of online information systems, comprising: a first web server that receives requests from a user for web content items and records web events for selected web content items, wherein each web event comprises content identification information identifying a web content item, time information describing an amount of time the user interacted with the web content item, and category relevance information for a plurality of categories about the web content item; an aggregation service that aggregates the plurality of web events recorded by the first web server with at least one web event obtained from a source remote from the first web server into aggregated information along at least one of a plurality of categorization dimensions; a user group service for defining a plurality of user groups, each user group having a definable membership rule which can be evaluated with respect to at least one category based on category relevance information from web events aggregated by the aggregation service; a profile service that determines for each user a user profile, the user profile specifying at least one user group, defined by the user group service, of which the user is member; an alliance service for sharing user profiles with one or more remote web servers participating in an alliance; a client application resident on a computer used by the user that records web events for selected items of web content requested from a second web server that does not itself record such web events, each web event recorded by the client application containing information identifying the web content item and time information describing an amount of time the user interacted with the web content, where the client application uploads the recorded web events periodically to a global upload service; and a global upload service, remote from the first web server, that maintains information for each user indicating one or more web servers that subscribe to receive web events for the user, receives the web events from the client application of a user, and provides the web events to the web servers that subscribe to the user's web events.