I've mentioned in the past the number of people Googling to the site to find information about felony offender registries and the official Tennesse (a misspelling of Tennessee) state site.
Since then, the new common search is for the Tennesse Felony offender site. I wont even get into how sad it is that people who live in a state don't know how to spell that state's name, but just pass along the official website for FOIL Tennessee's Felony Offender Information Lookup.
Someone came to the site looking for a Felony Offender registry. As far as I can tell the only state that has an online registry of felony offender is Tennessee.
Here are two lists of links to official Megan's Law registries (for sexual offenders):
Parent for Megan's Law
KLAAS Kids Foundation
The Center for Democracy and Technology's 10 Most Wanted Government Documents. It is no wonder the number of judicial documents on list considering the stranglehold Lexis and Westlaw have on the legal information database market. One of the biggest issues in the next several years (though I hope it is raised sooner, rather than later), is the use of free government information by private services, that then turn around and provide those services to consumers at exhorbitant rates.
Currently, the policy is that if the vendor attaches enough added value to the information, such use is allowed. Lexis certainly provides value to the government information contained in its database. But, there should be a time, and soon, when more judicial information is available online, through better interfaces, and directly from the government, and it'd be a shame if Lexis' juice prevented that information from being made available for free (which it seems is currently the case).
A couple articles (both via beSpacific) on the move to e-filing of documents by the U.S. government. The first article deals with e-filing of documents within in the judicial system. No specifics, but does track progression of these initiatives from its current nascent state (merely scanning paper documents by the courts), to the full realization of document submittal in XML.
I tried to play around with several of the courts they mention, but they all required an official login.
The second link has to do with the e-filing at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. They've begun filing electronic versions of documents on June 30 using a system they call Image File Wrapper (IFW), which seems to boil down to merely scanning existing applications. The eventual goal is to create an "end-to-end" patent application process by October, 2004. The initial iniative will require 100 terabytes of data storage.