Patent ID: 7124353

Claim:
A method for determining a user affinity for a topic comprising the steps of: assigning a category to at least one object; associating the at least one object with at least one user; maintaining a record of a number of times that actions are performed on the at least one object by the at least one user and a record of action types of the actions performed on the at least one object by the at least one user, wherein the types of the actions comprise an authoring action type, a response action type, a linking action type, and an editing action type, and wherein the record is maintained in meta data associated with the at least one object; associating a value with each of the action types of the actions performed on the at least one object by the at least one user; calculating a user affinity score for the user's association with the at least one object based on the number of times that actions are performed on the at least one object by the at least one user and the values associated with the action types of the actions performed on the at least one object by the at least one user; storing the user affinity score.