Whither Tuvalu?

The sea has been rising and will pretty clearly continue to rise.  This is not cause for immediate concern to citizens of Utah or Kyrgyzstan, but it's of great concern to citizens of countries such as Maldives (highest elevation 2.3 meters) or Kiribati (a few meters).  Or Tuvalu (4.5 meters).

Bear in mind that an island nation does not have to be completely inundated to become uninhabitable.  As the sea rises, the water inland becomes brackish and plants stop growing.  Storms become more destructive.  Even normal tides can become problematic and, leaving that aside, the amount of land, say, two meters above the sea will typically be dramatically less than the amount one meter above the sea.  It's a serious concern.

The Economist considers the worst case of an island nation becoming completely uninhabitable.  International law is unclear on this, there not being a lot of precedent, but the article speculates that, while the residents of the nation may be displaced and the nation itself no longer meet the criteria of having a clear territory or a permanent population, yet a nation might still remain a legal entity.  This matters because under this scenario the nation would still retain assets.

The most obvious asset is the territorial claim under the law of the sea (mainly territorial waters of 12 nautical miles and an economic zone of 200 nautical miles), but in the case of Tuvalu there is also the .tv domain (Maldives and Kiribati have their own domains of course, but haven't been able to exploit them economically the way Tuvalu has).  I've written before about how this didn't pan out to be quite the bonanza it was originally hoped to be, but according to Wikipedia it does bring in $4 million a year, or about $400 per year per capita under a contract expiring around 2012.

It's not clear what price the domain might fetch in the next round of negotiations, and in any case it would be small compensation for losing one's homeland, but amid all the sadness it's remarkable that perhaps some day the proceeds from a piece of virtual real estate will help sustain a virtual nation.

Sometimes they do listen

My correspondent who complained of bank's website putting "Complete Transfer" on a button that did not, in fact, complete the transfer is happy to report that the button now says "Continue Transfer".

Yay!

Kids, don't try this at home. Really. Don't.

Whenever I grab a spare moment from not being a lawyer and not being a security expert, I try to find time to not be a research chemist.  Fortunately for all of us, not only have more capable souls taken up that profession, but some of them have seen fit to blog about it.

Along with some interesting commentary on the pharma business and such, Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline includes two fine collections of hair-raising tales, under the headings of Things I Won't Work With and -- less extensively and not quite so entertainingly -- Things I'm Glad I Don't Do.  Some of it's a bit technical, but Lowe does a good job explaining things in a way someone with only basic knowledge of chemistry can understand.

And who am I to complain anyway?  I try to write in such a way that a non-compugeek reader can substitute "peanut butter" for terms like "sliding window protocol" and still get the gist, but I can't promise success in that regard.  At the very least, the non-chemist can substitute "exploding, highly-toxic and malodorous peanut butter" for most of the chemical terms and get the general drift.

Which, one must admit, does give the chemist a bit of a leg up.  I doubt I'll ever get to grace a post here with turns of phrase like

• ... the resulting compounds range from the merely explosive ... to the very explosive indeed
• Fragrance expert Luca Turin has described isonitriles as "the Godzilla of scent", and that's accurate, if you also try to imagine Godzilla's gym socks.
• ... water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good) ...
• A colleague of mine made some in graduate school, and came down the hall to us looking rather pale.
• It reeks to a degree that makes people suspect evil supernatural forces.
• ... it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile.
• It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem.
• Read the paper and be glad that this wasn’t your PhD project.

On the other hand, none other than Gordon Moore (of Moore's law fame) got his start in the sciences blowing things up back in the days when a child's chemistry set had Real Chemicals in it.  In their own way, wild-eyed-crazy chemistry experiments are just as much a part of the web's DNA as cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators peanut butter.




(When I was typing the first sentence, I missed the 'e' in "being."  Blogger's spell checker flagged it.  Yep.)

Really? I never mentioned Snopes?

Well that obviously needs fixed.

On the off chance that you haven't heard of it, snopes.com, more formally the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is the first place to go whenever someone forwards you a forward of a forward of ... a forward of an email containing some compelling factoid or tale.

All things considered, the signal/noise ratio of the web is surprisingly high.  Some sites, like Wikipedia, improve that ratio by (in aggregate) adding useful information.  Snopes does this as well, but also helps filter out the noise.  Given that it's a two-person operation (Barbara and David Mikkelson, who met during the days of alt.folklore.urban), one could make a strong case that Snopes accounts for more signal/noise improvement per person than any other site, if "signal/noise improvement per person" weren't such a geekily silly measure I'm not sure even I can use it with a straight face.

Crucially, Snopes does not set out specifically to debunk legends, though it may seem that way since only a small minority end up confirmed as true.  Rather, it sets out simply to document the known facts, track down how the various legends and rumors have circulated and if possible where they may have started, calling police departments and local officials to actually ask if something happened, and generally doing the journalistic legwork that too often gets bypassed in pursuit of a good story.

The Mikkelsons manage to do all this in evenhanded good faith and with a well-pitched sense of humor. Think of it as MythBusters for the web, albeit without Jamie's epic mustache.


Postscript: It occurs to me that studying the proliferation of urban legends ought to be a potent vaccine against taking the notion of "the wisdom of crowds" too far.

What's the Garden City Telegram saying today?

Ran across this while browsing through the news:  Newseum.org keeps images and readable PDFs of the front pages of hundreds of newspapers from dates it considers historically significant.  For copyright reasons, only selected front pages are available, but when they are the selection is impressive.

Navigation leaves a bit to be desired. Links from a particular front page to next and previous from the same paper would be nice, for example.  Nonetheless, it's a cool idea.

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean"

Another one in over the transom:

I have accounts at two different banks.  It's usually not a problem, but sometimes I need to transfer money from bank A to bank B.  I was happy to find out that bank B can do free transfers from other banks, after you've set things up.  It takes three days or so to clear, but that's generally no big deal.

All you have to do, once it's set up, is go on their web site and select "Transfer from outside the bank".  You select an account that you've already set up (bank A in my case).  You fill in the amount.  You select how you want the transfer done.  Actually there's just one choice: three-day free transfer.  At the bottom there's a button labeled "Complete Transfer"

So you click that button.  Another page comes up confirming the details you've just put in.  Great.  You're done.

Not so fast.

Three days later, there's no money transferred.  Contact customer service.  No, we don't see any record of it yet.  Please contact the bank where you initiated the transfer.

You're the bank where I initiated the transfer.

Sorry, don't see any sign of it.

Then you go back and try again.  You fill in the form.  You click on "Complete Transfer".  You see the same page with the details you just put in ... 

... and you think to scroll down to the bottom, which is cut off by your browser window.  At the bottom is a button that says "Send Transfer".

Didn't I just complete the transfer?  Guess not.  Click "Send Transfer".  The window goes gray and a spinny thing spins for a while.  Then you get a different window and a confirmation number.  Three days later the money is there.

Would it have killed anyone to have labelled the first button "Continue" instead of "Complete Transfer"?

Indeed.

[There's a happy ending, as announced in this post: The bank changed the text.  Yay!]

"Thank you for your business"

The book is The Thank You Economy, by Gary Vaynerchuk.  The thesis is that, thanks to social media, business is returning to its mom-and-pop roots, in that personal customer service is once again becoming important.  I ran across the book listening to an interview with Vaynerchuk on NPR.

I'm of two minds about this:

Mind 1: Hmm ... it's all different now, is it?  Is business, in fact, paying more attention to individual customers?  Did it really stop?  How would you measure this?

Anecdotal evidence:  Today I took my car to the shop expecting a hefty amount of deferred maintenance because, well, it had been a while.  Instead, they explained what it really needed, did that, offered to fix a couple of minor problems that had been bugging me for years, which I had them go ahead and do, and sent me on my way for a modest sum.  These were the same folks who last year quickly and efficiently diagnosed and fixed a problem that the dealer I called had had no clue about, which is why I came back in the first place.

Are they on Facebook?  No.  Can I follow them on Twitter? No.  Do they provide no-nonsense service at a reasonable price?  Absolutely.  Do they have all the business they can handle?  Judging by the parking lot and the steady stream of customers, I'm guessing so.  Are they run essentially the same way they would have been 50 years ago?  Quite likely.

Mind 2:  Well, I've got to be a fan of someone who titles the first chapter of his book "How Everything Has Changed, Except Human Nature", and anyone pushing for good old-fashioned customer service is OK in my book.  Rather than focus on what historical trends might or might not have been, another take is that the modern web offers tools that let good businesspeople serve their customers better, even if those customers are across the country or the world.  In that case, he's got a point, and probably a lot of useful experience and tips to share.

Mind, Vaynerchuk's own site makes the less modest claim that the "Thank you economy" is "the most important shift in culture businesses have seen," but then, he's got a book to sell.

Xanadu vs. the web: Part VI - Wikipedia and GNU

I've spent quite a few words on why Xanadu, sometimes called the original hypertext system (Vanevar Bush's Memex proposal and Doug Englebart's work notwithstanding), is not, in fact, the hypertext system we use.  With that as background, I'd like to take a look at two pieces of what actually developed, namely Wikipedia and the GNU project.

Wikipedia would seem very much in the spirit of Xanadu.  It seeks to create an interconnected collection of documents surveying humanity's store of knowledge.  It is not only freely accessible to anyone with a net connection, it is editable by anyone (or at least, anyone who can get along in the Wikipedia community, which is a great many people).  It remembers past versions.  Indeed, the edit history is an integral part of Wikipedia, not only technically but culturally.  It can be approached from any angle, read in any order and quoted freely.  It even has two-way links of a sort ("what links here").  One might think that, for example, the "Transliterature open standard" would have something to say about it, or at least wikis in general.

Your search - wiki site:transliterature.org - did not match any documents.


That's not completely fair, as Nelson's work is scattered across many sites across the web and off it, and I'm quite sure he's had at least something to say on the project, but whatever it is doesn't exactly leap to the fore.  You can plug xanadu.net and other sites into the search above and still find nothing.

Wikis are probably the most Xanadu-like, most hypertextual parts of the web.  They're not Xanadu, though.  They do not provide true transclusion, or the side-by-side, interconnected views that Nelson advocates, much less "flying islands" or more exotic presentations.  All they do is provide millions of people the means to explore the world's knowledge in personalized, non-linear, cross-referenced and interconnected ways.

Two conclusions one could draw from this:

1. Wikis, because they are not transclusive and appear much like traditional media on the screen, merely "simulate paper" and are thus detours on the true path to Xanadu.  We must fight on.
2. Easy editing, wide access and the ability both to follow links and to search are more important than strictly adhering to any particular vision of hypertext.

Xanadu, unfortunately, seems firmly in camp (1).

(It occurs to me that the back button on a browser would probably get the same treatment.  A one-way link with a generic way to navigate back is obviously not the same as a two-way link, but it turns out to provide significant value nonetheless.)

How did Wikis (or at least Wikipedia, which has by far the lion's share of Wiki-related traffic) get to be what they are?  People put up servers and people used them.

Project GNU and Xanadu would seem to have much in common.  Persuasive, eccentric founders (by eccentric I mean simply "far from the center") with radical, ambitious visions.  A strongly-defined subculture with vocabulary and practices all its own.  A strongly ideological bent (GNU even has its own manifesto) and a willingness to say that mainstream thought and practice are simply wrong.  A conviction that computing must be liberated from narrow-minded corporate constraints.

I've taken issue with GNU founder Richard Stallman's ideas myself (particularly here and to some extent here), but I certainly don't dismiss them out of hand.  To this day Stallman commands a degree of respect and attention, for a simple reason:

GNU shipped useful code.

If you run Linux, you're almost certainly running the GNU tools (among others) on top of the Linux kernel.  The kernel itself is built with GNU tools.  Even if you're not a Linux geek, if you use the web you've interacted with any number of servers running GNU tools.

Actually, there's a second reason, not quite as simple but even more significant.  Tons of code outside the GNU project has shipped under the GNU public license (GPL) or licenses heavily influenced by it.  Because of this, it's easy to, say, download Eclipse and a bunch of Apache libraries and start doing interesting stuff.  Stallman literally pioneered a whole new form of software development and distribution [There had been "shareware" and similar arrangements already, but the GPL is a completely different beast, particularly in its brilliant use of copyright law].

There are a lot of reasons why GNU has been so influential, even if not every hope or prediction has panned out, but none of them would have had much effect at all if Stallman and company had not produced actual, useful running code, particularly GNU Emacs and gcc.

Ironically, the GNU operating system itself, which prompted the whole effort, has fared less well.  Stallman announced in the original manifesto that an initial implementation of the kernel had been written (as indeed it had), and the actual work started around 1983, even before the manifesto.  Nonetheless to this day there is no stable release.  If that had been the whole story, we might well have another depressing tale of non-delivery (or in the case of GNU, not-quite-delivery).  Happily, though, that's not the whole story.  In the event, the kernel itself was effectively supplanted by the Linux kernel, which may or may not be the better result, but other development went on.

This willingness to shift tacks when the winds change is the hallmark of every successful project that I'm aware of.  It's a big reason we have the web we do.

Xanadu vs. the web: Part V - Fail.

This is the least pleasant segment to write.  Xanadu the architecture and business model are interesting to write about.  They may not have panned out, but they deserve to be studied and kept in mind.  It's never good to assume that the present way of doing things is the only or best way.  Xanadu provides alternatives that, if not viable, are at least worth thinking through.

However, there is a sadder side to the story: Xanadu the software project, which by any reasonable standard has been an unmitigated failure.  In particular, it never shipped anything of consequence.  Gary Wolf's piece, which again Nelson has strongly disputed, at least seems to square with the lack of notable Xanadu applications.  Autodesk founder John Walker's assessment of the four years and millions of dollars spent when Xanadu was affiliated with his company and given ample resources -- much more, for example, than were used to found Autodesk itself -- corroborates this.  Xanadu had literally become a footnote.

Looking through the various Xanadu websites, I can't say I've turned over every stone, but I've only managed to find three tangible results:

• A Windows demo dated 2007 that I haven't yet run because I don't have a suitable Windows box handy at the moment (and frankly, given everything else, I may never run)
• A Python script called the Transquoter
• A link to a site not directly affiliated with Xanadu but clearly influenced by it.
• [Since I wrote this, Xanadu has put up a demo of the UX, showing several texts side by side with the ability to jump from one to another.  Judge for yourself.  For my money it's not that much different from browsing Wikipedia or TV Tropes, despite the different visual presentation -- one could easily imagine a web browser with a browsing mode that looks like this.  Still, it is something tangible, and kudos to Xanadu for that.]

The Transquoter seems indicative of the overall state of things.  It essentially takes a list of links in a file and pastes their contents together.  Each quotation gets its own highlight color when moused over, and each quotation is a link.  The links in the file are of a special form, with query parameters indicating which version of the document in question to use and what range of characters to extract from it.  These both assume the stable "write once, never edit" model of documents that Xanadu uses.  The scheme would work for, say, Wikipedia articles, if you were careful to link to a particular version, but not for a lot of other things.

Never mind, though.  A sample is provided.  The sample links exclusively to Nelson's sites.  It's Nelson's content, Nelson's chosen servers and an officially blessed Python script.  Nonetheless, the links don't work.  The script generates plausible-looking links, with version and charrange parameters saying what to look for, but the servers just ignore them and serve the whole page.  The whole point of this transclusion thing, I thought, was that when you navigate from one occurence of the content to another, you actually get to that content in its context, not to the document it came from with no indication of where that content might be.

Seriously?

OK then, suppose you have a server that actually understands the syntax of the links.  Perhaps one that can take a link anywhere on the web, perhaps cache a copy of it to ensure stability, and serve that page up, showing the quoted text, suitably highlighted and in context.  Not something I'm inclined to work on personally, but certainly feasible.  How do you put together the document that references it?

You put together a text file containing an "edit difference list".  The only edit difference supported seems to be directly pulling in a quote by giving the position of the first character in the source document and a size in characters (working around HTML tags as needed).  No tool is provided for, say, highlighting some text in your browser and dragging it into a document-in-progress.  But hey, you can use any text editor you like to produce a list of specially-tweaked URLs to give to the script on the command line, to get an HTML file to upload to your site.

Seriously?


There's a principle in software engineering of "eating your own dogfood," that is, using your own tools wherever possible.  For example, Linux became "self-hosting", meaning that further development of Linux was done using Linux systems, at an early age.  Becoming self-hosting is a major rite of passage for many kinds of tool, particularly compilers.  Among other things, it's a fairly convincing demonstration that the tool can be used for something real.

Does Xanadu.net use the transquoter?  Not as far as I can tell.  If it did, there would probably be a real editor.

OK, enough.  At some point this is just piling on.


The most plausible demonstration of how Xanadu might work comes not from within Xanadu, but from Jason Rohrer's token_word system which Nelson mentions.  It attempts to show what a payment system based on Xanadu's pay-per-first-access model would look like.  You can even put in real money via a PayPal account, though fortunately the first 50,000 "tokens" are free.  [I can no longer find a running version of token_word.  Its developer, Jason Rohrer appears to be developing video games now, though there is quite a bit of other interesting stuff on Rohrer's SourceForge site, including some material on token_word -- D.H. Oct 2018]

There are documents on the site, though not very many, and you can construct new documents by writing text or by pulling quotations in from other documents in the system.  The process is inconvenient but doable: To extract quotes you put <q> and </q> tags around the text you want to quote in an edit box and push a button. Then you put <q n=""> into your own text — use <q 0=""> for the first quote you extracted, <q 1=""> for the next ... Stone-age tools, but I can forgive that here because 1) the site looks to be fairly old and done as a spare-time project by one person, 2) other parts of the demo, particularly tracking how much text you've accessed, work and 3) the stone-age axe at least has a handle and a blade.

Have a look around if you like.  At least it's something.  It's the kind of demo that, if there were more of them and they had together been developed into a prototype system, might have gotten people to take the project seriously.  Personally, I believe I got enough of the flavor to see that I would prefer not to access documents in such a way, even with a slicker interface, but that's a good thing.  Allowing people to make that kind of determination is exactly why we have demos, and it's what puts the site light-years ahead of the transquoter, which would probably leave most people scratching their heads.




Xanadu has been around as a concept since the 1960s.  People have devoted years of their lives to working on it.  Millions of dollars have been spent.  In that time the entire computing industry has been turned upside down multiple times.   [Did I really say that?  Well, the technology, at least, has undergone major changes.] Thousands of new companies have emerged, some even surviving.  Billions of lines of code have been written.  Protocols have been defined.  Apps have been written and shipped, fortunes made, lost, remade.  Even taking into account the inherent architectural difficulties of the Grand Scheme, even if every word of Wolf's story is absolutely accurate, even taking into account code lost at various stages during the development of the project, it still boggles the mind just how little there is to show for it.

Xanadu vs. the web: Part IV - Quotations

The whole concept of Xanadu, particularly transclusion, is based on the idea of taking pieces out of existing texts and re-presenting them in new combinations as new text.  Xanadu as I understand it in no way precludes producing new text -- obviously that has to happen -- but it assumes that quotation is a major activity.

As far as I can tell, it isn't.

That's not to say that there aren't forms and genres that rely on quotation.  Collage, for example, goes back to the beginning of the previous century under that name, entertainment journalism uses quotation extensively, sampling is famously part of the turn-of-the-century music scene, and there are older examples in history.  The Victorian commonplace book comes to mind.  Nonetheless, most works don't rely extensively on quotations.

From a personal perspective, I hardly ever quote in this blog.  I do try to include links where appropriate, but most of those are internal to this blog, and even then they're not dominant.  There are quite a few posts here with no links at all [actually, not so many -- the other blog is less linky, being less webby -- but still, there are relatively few posts that you can't get most of the good out of without ever chasing a link].  In any case, including a link and inviting the reader to chase it is clearly not what Nelson has in mind.  A transclusive Xanadu document is essentially a new literary form, which is great, but most content hews to existing forms because those forms work.  Likewise, most content tries to be original because that's what audiences and creators both want.

That's not to say that most works don't refer to other works.  One one level they do so simply by adhering to existing forms, which are established and modified over time by the works of previous creators.  On a more familiar level, they tend to refer allusively.  If I refer to, say, sampling, as above, I'm not going to paste in a bunch of audio clips from Old School rappers sampling James Brown.  I just mention sampling and assume that you're already familiar with the idea.

This more subtle mesh of allusions and cultural references has always been the sinew that holds literature and culture together.  A too-literal interpretation of this as a mesh of actual quotations seems more limiting than liberating.

Xanadu vs. the web: Part III - Xanadu the business model

Any publishing scheme has to solve two basic problems: How do you get the content out to people -- or perhaps more importantly, how do you get people to the content -- and how does everyone, particularly the creators of the content, get paid.  Granted, there are any number of reasons people will create content for free (as with most blogs, for example, this one very much included), but to get anything going on a serious scale there will have to be money involved at various points.

Technology has steadily made it easier to disseminate content, to the point where any random blogger now has a potential readership in the hundreds of millions, but it hasn't made it any easier to find readers.  Most blogs have a readership considerably below a hundred million.  Finding readers requires editing, to choose what to publish and make sure it is of good quality, and marketing to make people aware of what you're publishing and try to get them to read it.  Publishing is a different thing entirely from printing.  Publishers, in this broader sense, have to exist in any viable system, whether the web or something Xanadu-like.

To my knowledge there are two main ways of getting people paid: Advertising, and direct payment, whether one-time or subscription.  Xanadu proposes to provide direct payment by means of transcopyright and micropayment.  Micropayment is already in use in various forms, so let's assume it can be extended to the level that Xanadu requires.  The more interesting concept here is transcopyright.

Transcopyright is a license agreement, meant to be enforceable under existing laws, that allows use of content so long as the content is not actually copied, but instead presented as a link back to the original context.  So far, this seems much like what we have on the web, except we usually just make a link and don't actually quote the text.  But Xanadu posits that you pay for paid content when you chase the link (more accurately, the first time you chase the link).

To this end, the (draft) transcopyright license stipulates that the content must be held on the author's servers.  To work on today's web, the exact wording would have to be adjusted to be more cloud-friendly, but that doesn't seem insurmountable, nor does it seem inconsistent with the overall picture.  Storing redundant copies in places other than the place of origin is explicitly part of the Xanadu model.

Nonetheless, I can think of two reasons why this may not work.  The first is the pay-for-access model in general.  There are any number of highly motivated major players -- record labels and movie studios come to mind -- who have been trying very hard to control access to content.  I've written at length on why this is fundamentally a losing battle (see the DRM tag in general, or this attempt at a pithy summary).

In practice, access can only really be controlled under special circumstances, for example in the case of cable pay-per-view where the cable company owns the box, and even then the control doesn't mean much.  If people want to pirate, they can and will.

On the other hand, it's clear that people will pay for content even if they could get it for free.  My guess is that it's some combination of people by and large not wanting to break the law and people understanding that if no one's getting paid, no one will, say, make blockbuster movies.  This is actually good news for the Xanadu scenario.  Most likely, in such a scheme, if it existed at all, people would be willing to pay, even if they could pirate -- and of course they could.  But that leads me to my second point.

People don't mind paying for content, but they do mind hassle and uncertainty in payment.  For example, many people hate hate hate having to watch their cell phone usage to make sure they didn't wander through a roaming area or go over their minutes and will pay a premium in order just to know what the bill will be every month.  They'll actually pay more for a less transparent pricing system.

Paying per access can be fine in some cases.  I'm fine with going through a little payment ritual for an on-demand movie because 1) I know up front what I'm paying for and how much it will be, and 2) It doesn't interrupt my viewing of the film.  I may be missing something in the Xanadu scenario, but as far as I can tell the pay-per-first-retrieval model means either an obtrusive taxicab-style meter showing how much you're spending as you browse, or the uncertainty of finding out later how much you've paid (or being interrupted by a "please deposit another $X" message at random intervals).

Instead, what we have outside limited contexts such as on-demand video, mp3 audio and smartphone apps, is advertising [of these, on-demand video is still around, in parallel to subscription streaming, audio is almost entirely subscription streaming, and smartphone apps are a combination of one-time payment, ads, subscription and something not really mentioned in this blog: in-app purchases -- D.H. 31 Dec 2024].

You can think of advertising as a sort of indirect micropayment system.  When you view content with ads in it, you "pay" by having to watch the ad and potentially being influenced to buy something.  However, the actual exchange of money is between the advertiser and the creator (and various intermediaries).  The advertiser gets paid back, assuming the ad campaign worked, when you decide to buy something, which you will do with high enough probability to justify the expense (or they'll stop running the ad, or go out of business).  Advertising revenue correlates with volume of access.  The more people access your content, the more traffic the ads get and the more money the creator gets.

It seems worth noting here that the advertising model has little if anything to do with quotation and copyright.  I don't have to enter into a licensing agreement with you for you to be able to read this blog or for me to be able to (hypothetically) run ads on it.  Copyright matters mainly in preventing someone from, say, mirroring a popular blog and running their own ads on it.

In short, we don't need a new concept of copyright to make online content widely available and make sure creators can get paid.  We just need to put up with ads [of course I would say that, considering my employer, wouldn't I?].