You can now search for material with a free to reuse license.
Whoever said metadata is crap, will obviously have to rethink that idea as more and more services like this Creative Commons Search becomes available.
I'm entirely on board with the observations fueling the anti meta utopia movement, but there are too many interesting cases that do work to forget about metadata just yet. The main things that work are

Tool automated metadata. RSS works. Trackback works. Technorati is in business. This is because bloggers have their metadata automatically created.
Performative metadata. When you add Creative Commons licensing metadata to your website, you are actually granting this given license, not just mentioning the license. The Creative Commons metadata is a performative utterance on your part. The good thing about performative metadata is that it can't be wrong. It might be unintended, but whatever you said, you actually said. Toy examples of metadata are rarely performative. It's usually something silly on the order of <dog><link rel="hasa" url="http://tail"></dog>, but there are tons of examples of performative metadata like the Creative Commons one, it's just not very common yet, because nobody has set up a good infrastructure.