Melissa Data, which enables mass mailers, keeps adding lots of good, free online lookups. Here's its summary of some of the most relevant for journalists:

• Lookup ZIP Codes, city names, the location of phone numbers or the cities covered by an area code.
• Enter a phone number or area code and get city, state, county, time zone and more.
• Search for a street name nationwide. Displays a lists of states and cities with the name with local street address detail.
• Information on over 1,000,000 geographic places.
• State, City and County demographics from the 2000 census.
• Lookup any U.S. address and get the ZIP+4 code, area code, time zone, county, address type, street detail and more.
• Number of home sales and average sell price by ZIP Code.
• Individuals who have contributed to federal campaigns by ZIP Code.
• Monthly low, average and high temperatures by ZIP Code.
• Obtain a list of the ZIP Codes in any county in the United States.
• Display the distance between any two 5-digit ZIP Codes in the United States.
• Display a listing of the ZIP Codes that fall within a radius.
• Display a listing of the Area Code + Prefixes that fall within a radius.
• Income tax information by ZIP Code. Includes average AGI, number of returns, average refund, age & more.
• Information on a nonprofit organizations by ZIP Code. Includes address, revenue, assets, type of foundation and more.
• Current information on Unemployment Rate and Labor Force by ZIP Code.

Here's a CNN article on how lawyers are using jail databases to find clients.

You can get the table of contents of the Federal Register e-mailed to you every day. The Federal Register is a daily compilation of new federal regulations, legal notices and executive orders. Click on "online list mailing archives," then "FEDREGTOC-L." Lots of other General Printing Office publications also have e-mail alerts too.

Great Schools offers lots of information - though not always the freshest - about public and private schools nationwide. This includes such things as test scores, parent/teacher ratios and student body demographics for each school. Each state has a page, including Indiana and Kentucky.

The FEC offers data, in Excel or PDF form, on national political party spending through the end of February.

Sports Venues offers lots of information, some of it for a fee, on how sports stadiums and arenas make money.

The daughter of a Kentucky coal miner created a Web site to document the names of every coal miner who has died here since the early 1900s. For some reason it stops around 2000.

A coalition that "includes librarians, journalists, good government and environmental groups, and labor" have a new site called Open the Government for "defending the First Amendment, promoting free expression, strengthening national security and fighting censorship."

Find out which presidential candidate your immediate neighbors have contributed to, and how much, at Fundrace. It also gives your neighbors' occupations and how far they live from you. For some reason I'm surrounded by Kucinich voters.

If you have a town name or zip code and you need to know the county it's in, use the NETR County Locator.

Feedster now offers e-mail alerts when a blogger mentions words you specify. Feedster says it's useful for "Monitoring what people are saying about you, your product, or your company ... Tracking current events ... Watching your competition ... Finding out the latest news on a celebrity or event."

AssignmentEditor.com is a PR-owned site for journalists.

FreeFullText.com "provides direct links to over 7000 scholarly periodicals which allow some or all of their online content to be viewed by ANYONE with Internet access for free."

Web Tips offers an article on "Foreign Affairs Backgrounders."

Here are some valuable Digital Collections search tips, courtesy of the University of Missouri:

• You can limit your searches to a particular day, month or year. For example, to get all the stories from December 25, 1995, type month=12 day=25 year=1995. Use year=1995 if you only want stories from 1995 or month=12 if you only want stories from December or day=25 if you only want stories from the 25th of the month.
• To make sure all the words you are searching for appear in the same sentence, surround the words with square brackets: [jerry abramson dave armstrong]. Use curly braces {} if you want the words to appear in the same paragraph and angle brackets <> if you want words in the same clause.
• Follow a word with an exclamation point to also search for synonyms of that word. For example, alcohol! will also look for drink, sauce, spirits and the like.
• To search for a particular category, type aspect=categoryname. For example, to search for fashion articles, type aspect=fashion.

Testycopyeditors.org was founded by a Washington Post copy editor. It has a discussion board where you can vent. I liked this week's back and forth ("Bad attack of gas") prompted by a copy editor who complained that his newspaper was running an AP story about record gas prices that didn't adjust for inflation. (Sound familiar?)

You can get audits by the Kentucky Auditor's office online.

Here are 15 great Excel tips from P.C. Magazine.

The Kentucky Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, lets you search online for filings.

HotBot's new, free toolbar does Google's several better - such as by indexing and searching your computer's hard drive and downloading RSS feeds.

The Kentucky Secretary of State now lets you search for notaries.

The National Center for Education Statistics has a searchable database on private schools.

Greg Johnson notes that Democratic U.S. Representative Henry Waxman spearheaded creation of a searchable database of what Waxman says are misleading WMD statements made by top Bush administration officials.

Martha Elson points out that "a really handy place to look up information about elected officials (nationally, including Kentucky) is http://www.vote-smart.org."

Here's a list of principal FOIA contacts at federal agencies.

You can order Kentucky driver history records online. You get the driver's status, license expiration, driving restrictions, and traffic violations - but only the last three years is considered a public record.

A survey finds that more than 70 percent of newspaper readers never visit their newspaper's Web site.

The Kentucky Revenue Cabinet offers a list (PDF) of 2003 property tax rates for all Kentucky counties.

Megasoccer is a search engine - still in the testing phase - devoted only to soccer.

Lots of European statistics at Eurostat.

YourDictionary.com offers the "100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English." For all intensive purposes, this doesn't apply to me.

Drugs@FDA is a database that lets you search for information on drugs approved and tentatively approved by the Food and Drug Administration back to 1939. Search by name or active ingredient. A search returns the drug's approval history and related documents, a consumer information sheet, label information and more. Impressive.

Google is experimenting with a new local search option that maps businesses and services near an address, much like Yahoo's recently unveiled "SmartView" service reported here earlier this week. It pulls up phone numbers, addresses and related Web sites, although when I tried it, it also provoked multiple server errors.

SMEALSearch is "a niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business. The search engine crawls websites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts."

Topix.net automatically sifts online news into highly specific categories - say all the news about a particular town, subject or person. "News organizations should keep an eye on evolving technologies like Topix.net, because they are bound to change the way our audiences get their news," says Jonathan Dube in a Poynteronline Web Tips column.

An article from the Online Journalism Review asks "Is a Reporter's E-mail Address Really Anyone's Business?"

The Statistical Briefing Book "has been redesigned to make it easier to find basic statistical information on juvenile offending, victimization of juveniles, and involvement of youth in the juvenile justice system."

GoogleBlaster lets you enter multiple separate searches in a box and get all the results from Google at once, instead of having to do it one search at a time.

An article by Greg Notess on how to search for particular file types -- say a PDF file or an Excel spreadsheet -- with the major search engines.

Microsoft Word documents sometimes have potentially newsworthy information hidden in them. Word's track changes feature stores the history of changes made to the document in what's called "metadata" that can be recovered by anyone. Keep that in mind next time you're handed a Word document or find an official document posted on the Web (or give one to someone else). Here's an example where a Word document revealed that a company that recently sued DaimlerChrysler had originally planned to sue the Bank of America. And here's a 2003 article from New Scientist.com about a researcher's findings on the phenomena -- which is true of other file formats as well.

John Peter Zenger Lives is "A daily index of opinion from mainstream American newspapers." Zenger was a printer who won a historic libel case in the 1700s.

PopPlanet is "a resource of up-to-date country specific information on key population, environment, and health issues. Topics include: biological, flora and mineral resources, water pollution and scarcity, land resources and degradation, health services, and health impacts from the environment"

DrugDigest is "a noncommercial, evidence-based, consumer health and drug information site dedicated to empowering consumers to make informed choices about drugs and treatment options."

You can search for synonyms of words in Google by adding a tilde (~) to the front of the word. For example, to include synonyms of the word journalism in your search, type ~journalism.

Infomine, the "Scholarly Internet Resource Collections," offers "114,936 Academically Valuable Resources." This includes "databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information." There's also a free e-mail alert about new additions to the site.

The news search portal shows the tremendous number of options for finding news on the Web, including video, radio, blogs and more.

Yahoo maps has added "SmartView," which plots nearby restaurants, entertainment, hospitals, police stations, schools, universities, gas stations, parking, shopping and much more around addresses you map.

EconData.Net, "Your Guide to Regional Economic Data on the Web," has "1,000 links to socioeconomic data sources, arranged by subject and provider, pointers to the Web's premiere data collections, and our own list of the ten best sites for finding regional economic data." It also offers a free monthly newsletter called StatScan.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics offers an annual statistical profile of transportation in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Poynteronline's Sree Sreenivasan writes about the value of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by the users themselves.

Wikitravel is "a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide."

A Wiki, by the way, is a Web site where anyone can add content or make changes.

Stateline.org offers a "50-state rundown on gay marriage laws."

offender.us summarizes where to find online sex offender registries, inmate information and criminal background checks.

Gasbuddy.com identifies Web sites reporting gas prices for the U.S. and Canada. For example, it will take you to Louisvillegasprices.com, which lists the lowest and highest prices reported locally in the last 72 hours.

Libdex is an index to 18,000 libraries.

Internet resources on aging from AARP.

The National Conference of State Legislatures lists and links to all the states where you can find live broadcasts of legislative proceedings. That includes Indiana and Kentucky.

The GAO recently looked at how private companies use Social Security numbers and the laws that limit their use.

The Scoop, by Derek Willis, a writer and data analyst for the Center for Public Integrity, is a weblog devoted to journalism and computer-assisted reporting. Willis also compiles IRE's Extra! Extra! guide to the latest investigative work.

The Scannery specializes in searching the Web sites of 12,000 public companies from around the world.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, "a nonprofit consumer education, research, and advocacy program," offers a fact sheet on medical records privacy.

The National Science Digital Library is an "educational resource for science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

The still developing Trackle monitors up to 25 Web pages for changes and emails you excerpts. It offers a 14-day free trial or a year's subscription for $19.95.

Your inner snitch can't help but appreciate Narc-Scent ("Can you smell a cop? Not with NARC-SCENT! Smells identical to burning marijuana!")

The Food and Drug Administration has a searchable database of warning letters to companies that have run afoul of its rules and regulations. Search by company, subject and date - and get the companies' responses too.

A controversial bill before Congress would allow companies to copyright databases - with unknown consequences for computer-assisted reporting.

The Kentucky Department of Library and Archives has updated its Web site to make it easier to use. Among its offerings that could be useful to reporters and editors:

• Ask a Librarian is "an e-mail reference service provided by the Reference staff of the State Library. Librarians provide research assistance and referral services to Kentucky State government employees, citizens of Kentucky, and others needing information on Kentucky topics."
• Information about public records and how they are managed.
• Criminal Case Record Request Form - This is for really old cases that have been archived, not recent ones.
• Basic facts about Kentucky's governors
• Electronic records retention schedule (pdf)
• An online catalog that also has links to many actual federal government documents because the department is a depository library.
  

IRE/NICAR has a new campus crime database it is reselling to journalists for a small fee. "The Clery Act Campus Crime statistics are the only standardized source of school-by-school data for the United States from 2001 and 2002. The U.S. Department of Education data represent alleged criminal offenses reported to campus police or local law enforcement for 8,282 postsecondary institutions."

Uniform Commercial Code - or UCC - filings are an underutilized tool for background research. When someone borrows money buy something, a lender will often file a UCC financing statement with the borrower's county or state to legally protect its interests. The Investigative Reporter's Handbook says: "UCC recordings are to personal property such as computers, yachts and automobiles what mortgages are to real property such as land and buildings. Knowledgeable investigators use UCC statements to document who is doing business with whom." You can search for them at the Kentucky Secretary of State's Web site. Go to the home page, click on UCC filings on the left, then UCC On-Line Services, then UCC Index Search. You search by organization or name, and you can get a copy of the document itself.

Spybot Search & Destroy is a free and highly-rated program that scrubs so-called spyware - such as programs that report your viewing habits to advertisers - from your PC.

In honor of Al Cross's story today about abuse of Parks Department credit cards, we offer govpro.com, "your online source for news and events, articles, and the most comprehensive database of supplier and product information intended to fulfill the needs of the government professional." I trust that includes hot tub supplies.

Wget is a free program that makes it easy to download multiple Web pages - even whole sites - for later viewing. I use it sometimes to grab multiple files from the Internet. But it's what's called a command-line program - meaning you type obscure commands to make it work instead of clicking on menus as you do with your typical Windows program. It has many options: You can grab only Web pages, or only Excel spreadsheets, or only Word files, if you so choose. You can also grab only new pages, while leaving pages you've already grabbed before alone. If you're not careful, you could suck up the entire Internet, so if you decide you need it, consult a professional.

Blowsearch is yet another meta search engine that queries as many as 20 search engines at once. And of course it has its own toolbar.

From the Online Journalism Review: Ombudspeople discuss how the Internet has changed their work. Michael Getler of the Washington Post on whether the Internet has made reporters lazy: "Anecdotally, you could probably make the case that reporters get out of the office less often than they used to before the Web was available."

SEC Info is a an alternative - free for now - to the Security and Exchange Commission's own Edgar database for obtaining information on public companies. You can search by industry, business, area code, zip code, by name and more and get e-mail notification of new filings.

University Business is the online version of the magazine for "presidents and other senior officers at two- and four-year colleges and universities throughout the United States." In other words, those who are corrupting the academy with the corporate ethos.

Bissonnette on Costume is "A visual Dictionary of Fashion" that allows geographical, time and subject searching.

ZapMeta.com, "All Results, One Engine," lets you search multiple search engines at once and combines the results in useful ways.

The Sample Size Calculator lets you know how many people you must interview to produce a representative opinion survey. Needless to say, your typical man and woman on the street interviews won't cut it.

Iraq Coalition Casualty Count is a widely praised site that tracks military wounded and fatalities.

National Institute for Sports Reform says it's "the only organization in the United States that is specifically devoted to studying and advocating needed sports reform at the pre-professional level."

WiredSafety.org is "the world's largest Internet safety, help & education organization."

The Informed Librarian Online "is a monthly compilation of the most recent tables of contents from over 275 ... domestic and foreign library and information-related journals, e-journals, magazines, e-magazines, newsletters and e-newsletters."

Ever frustrated by having to wait to get copies of documents or outraged by the 50 cents a page charged by the federal courts? Consider using a digital camera to make photocopies. Many digital cameras have settings that allow you to take readable close ups of paper records. Here's Poynter's e-media tidbits column on a new cell phone that also does photocopies.

Prints the Chaff is a blog for newspaper editors.

New York is going to put all its court records online. If only Kentucky were so progressive.