Internet Genres

Rhetoricians since Aristotle have attempted to classify communications or documents into categories or “genres” with similar form, topic or purpose. This article surveys research on genre as it relates to Internet documents. The article briefly presents the concept of genre in general, and then reviews the evolution and emergence of genres on the Internet. It concludes with an examination of the possible use of genre for improving information access on the Internet, with specific discussion of the issues in developing taxonomies of genre and automatically recognizing document genre.