CLIENT-SIDE DIRECTOR FOR CUSTOMIZABLE NETWORK DATA RETRIEVAL

A client-side director is presented. The director is free of a universal resource locator entry element and provides web-browsing capabilities to a user using services provided by an operating system. The director displays a web page associated with a first web site in the site list. The director may also be used to collect network performance statistics between the client and a remote site. A web page may be filtered by removing links listed as forbidden by site criteria. One or more content items may be generated by the users of the director and distributed by a channel server to other users. The channel server uses a unique identifier associated with each director and a subscriber database to determine which directors to send the content to. An identifier module and an identifier database are used by the channel to distribute the content to the directors.