As online content delivery and interaction has become ubiquitous, online service providers have developed and are continuing to develop features to distinguish themselves from each other. From personalized content pages to highly interactive multi-media content, a variety of online features are currently being offered in the battle to attract new users and to retain existing users. These features are generally integrated within the offered content, however, some features may operate as independent applications (e.g., chat dialog boxes) that cooperate with offered content. These features are designed with the thought that in operation they engage participating users to request additional content.
Currently, several features are automatically integrated in offered content. These schemes have been implemented for automatically integrating associations for initiating these described online functions, features, and operations. Exemplary functions, features, and operations may include automatically addressing an e-mail message, performing a look up in a cooperating database, providing a hyperlink to one or more Internet web pages, and providing enhanced content.
One current scheme for integrating features in offered content involves incorporating associated (or “smart”) tags and links in online content such as web pages. Smart tags allow users to select individual words, phrases, or names offered by an online content server that are viewable on the display screen of a client computer cooperating with the content server. The incorporation and execution of smart tags in online content is generally realized through a string of communications between a computing application on the client computer that displays the content (and corresponding smart tags) and the content server housing and generating the desired content. In operation, content may be requested by a participating user through a computing application from a content server. The content server, in response, may aggregate relevant content for distribution to the requesting computing application. Upon receipt of the content, the computing application parses the received content and compares it against a data file (which must be downloaded to the client computer), containing a predefined list of words, phrases, names, and actions to determine if one or more smart tags are to be incorporated into the received content to generate displayable content. After the comparison, the generated displayable content is offered to display and interaction to participating users. For example, using this scheme, if the string “Barry Bonds” is incorporated as a smart tag, user selection of the text “Barry Bonds” may result in a short biography of the baseball player Barry Bonds to be automatically called up from a local, cooperating data file on the client computer and displayed to the participating user.
However, current schemes for incorporating and executing smart tags in online content are limited in that they require the deployment of code to the client computer. That is, under current schemes, users must download a file to the client computer (e.g., from the content server or another computer in a network) containing the list of terms to be recognized as smart tags and defining smart tag actions that are relevant to the online content. This client side deployment directly impacts participating users' navigation and interaction experiences by forcing them to contend with download messages and security warnings inherent in the download process. Additionally, once the user navigates away from the online content, the user has to remove the deployed code on the computer that was only relevant to the previous online content. Finally, changes may be made to the online content, requiring the user to download additional code reflecting the changes.
Therefore, it is appreciated that there exists a need for a system and methods that integrate and employ smart tags in online content without the need to deploy client side code.