A
system that enables enterprises to design, create integrate and operate online communities. The
system operates as an on-demand hosted platform (
software-as-a-service) that provides a secure and reliable architecture on which enterprises can safely and securely develop, execute and manage their online communities. The platform combines a wide range of web-based participation technologies (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, social networking, podcasts,
RSS, tagging, photos, videos, mapping, and the like). Any content can have attributes that make it appear as any type of content. With this uniform content architecture, all user-generated content is treated as a post (or, more generally, a submission), and there is no need for a participant to author multiple entries for separate uses. Preferably, all content created or otherwise associated with a particular author is intrinsically tied or “linked” to the author via the author's profile. Thus, at each point of participation, the content is associated with the individual, which allows the
system to build and maintain a rich “living” profile for each
community member. Using this approach, the system can build and enable querying of so-called “social aggregations,” which are data sets that describe a relationship among one or more author attributes and one or more content attributes.