Metadata, again...

I've blogged about metadata for various file types before, and the other day I saw a question regarding metadata in MS Works documents. That was pretty interesting, so I fired up my 'leet Google h4x0R skillz and entered in metadata + "MS Works" as my search terms, and I ended up finding something called Meta-Extractor from the folks at the National Library of New Zealand. This tool appears to be Java-based, is about a 10.7MB download, and appears to extract metadata from a variety of file formats...to include MS Works! That's interesting...I didn't even know that MS Works docs had metadata! My first real intro into Word metadata involved the Blair doc...and I'm aware that other Office OLE file formats have metadata, as well.

Another such tool is Metagoofil, from DarkNet. I haven't tried this one...but then I haven't had a great deal of need for things like metadata. When I have, I've written my own tools.

One of the more interesting ways to generate some cool metadata is to use MergeStreams to merge an Excel spreadsheet into a Word doc. I used to present on this at LE conferences all the time, along with things like NTFS alternate data streams, and hiding data in the Registry...but it looks like this stuff is just kewl nerd stuff and nothing more...