Jamie Smith Hopkins, a business reporter for the Baltimore Sun, has volunteered to teach an hour-long class to journalism students about Internet resources, and she asked for my favorite Web sites for looking up stuff.
Here they are, in no particular order:
1. http://www.guidestar.com for info on non-profits.
2. http://www.martindale.com a database from Martindale on finding attorneys.
3. http://www.investopedia.com is a good site for tutorials and a business term dictionary.
4. http://www.investorwords.com/ is the biggest, best site for investing terms on the Web.
5. http://www.netronline.com/public_records.htm is my all-time favorite. I can spend hours looking up the values of people’s houses, like my fellow professors, my friends, my relatives, and the parents of my students.
6. http://www.landings.com/Â is a great database of airplane ownership.
7. http://www.switchboard.com is good because it has unlisted phone numbers.
8. http://theboost.net/unlisted_phone_number/Â is another good one for unlisted numbers.
9. http://www.reversephonedirectory.com/ is good when you only have a phone number. It also has a cell phone directory, but it costs a lot of money.Â
Give me your suggestions for No. 10. I have yet to find a good, FREEÂ online database for cell phone numbers.
According to the National Law Journal, many firms are no longer listing in Martindale. From a May 2007 NLJ story: In the last year alone, megafirms Weil, Gotshal & Manges; Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; Dechert and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal all dropped out of Martindale-Hubbell. Indeed, of the firms listed in the Am Law 100 survey of the nation’s top-grossing law firms, nine no longer have Martindale-Hubbell profiles.