[Sigia-l] Topics v. Types

[Ruth Kaufman]

I was just looking closely at FARK's UI for submitting a link and noticed
that the Topic selection menu offers options such as Advice, Amusing,
Asinine, Audio; also Florida, Followup, Hero, Interesting, Ironic, and Misc.
The Link Type selection menu offers options such as Business, Crime/Law,
Entertainment News, Fark Party, Game, Misc, News, Photoshop.

http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/submit.pl

In my mind, topics should be what the content is about -- the subject matter
for the opinion, report, or dialog. Also, in my mind, types should refer to
some facet of the thing in question, in this case links. What is a link
type? I think of types of links as "anchor" or "form actions", but this
isn't useful in this context. The next facet that seems link type-ish is a
characterization of the use of the link, such as "internal" or "external" (
i.e., to the scope of the site). Also not terribly useful. A useful link
type might characterize the genre of the content behind the link, perhaps
News, Commentary, ... maybe something like some of the selections FARK
presents in the Topic menu; for example, Caption, Followup, Obvious, Satire.

Just one person's opinion, but I think FARK doesn't distinguish well between
Topic and Type and that FARK has mostly reversed the meanings of these
facets. I wonder what others on the list think of as Topic v. Type, and also
Topic v. Subject.


1) How topic-specific should types be? In other words, if you craft your
link or content types as genres or flavors of content, eventually, you'll
crash into subject headings. In my experience, it depends on the content and
application, but I wonder if anyone has come up with any heuristics.
2) Are topics more newsy than subjects? Or are they simply subjects in
motion/in dialog?
3) Would a typology of types be useful to anyone (other than me :-))?

Thanks for your insights.

Ruth