I’ve never heard of CreativeCommons prior to this assignment, so I felt like I was at a disadvantage. The “About” page wasn’t extremely helpful, noting that “there is no front door—no tool designed for the general public to facilitate discovery for the purpose of reuse and remix” (CreativeCommons). I noticed this when I went back to the homepage to see just the search bar and search parameters; the simplistic design of the page left me wishing there was a little more information about what you can search or maybe an example, but I digress.
The first few things I searched didn’t provide me with much and I was still trying to get a basic understanding of CreativeCommons as a whole. Finally, in an attempt to appease the stereotypical college student in me, I decided to search Netflix. Due to the large amount of shows and movies on Netflix, I was expecting my screen to be flooded by movie covers and screenshots of popular TV shows. This, however, was the opposite. There were pictures of conference attendees (no identifiable evidence but maybe a Netflix conference?), DVD queues, and even a few of the “We’re having trouble playing this title…” messages that any Netflix enthusiast despises.
The most interesting thing that I found, however, was the amount of photos of DVDs from when Netflix delivered them via mail. There were pictures of them sitting on tables, being slipped into mailboxes, and even in intriguing poses (like the one pictured above with Taro the Shiba Inu).
Going back to the point I made at the beginning of my post, the design of the website weakens the usability of the search engine, not providing any information or hints as to what the user might type into the search bar. Google and Bing don’t provide any specific information as to what someone might look up, but I believe they are able to pull it off due to their popularity and success. This is where I believe CreativeCommons falls short. From what I was able to find while taking the website for a test drive, CC is limited to providing its users with images and not texts or video clips. This isn’t always a bad thing, however; it just depends on the project that the user is working on and what materials they need. I believe, as CreativeCommons continues to grow, there will be a larger audience and more activity on the site and, as the website writes, “it will go beyond simple search to aggregate results from across the hundreds of public repositories into a single ledger” (CreativeCommons).
Word Count: 456
Works Cited
“About CC Search.” CC Search Prototype, ccsearch.creativecommons.org/about.
“taro the shiba and netflix, take 1!” by Taro the Shiba Inu is licensed under CC BY 2.0