Hawk circles over infringers
Mixed Nuts this week gets serious, looking at two government-related sites and a business site that tracks down possible cybersquatters.
Citizenhawk.com is a business-related site that finds possible trademark infringers or other sites taking advantage of your Web address. Some studies suggest 15 percent of all Web searches send people to wrong addresses caused by spelling errors.
Say you own the site Happytrails.com. Type in the name at Citizenhawk and it reports 23 potential infringers who use similar names. Some include: happitrails.com, cappytrails.com or happy-trails.com. Not all of those instances might be real infringements; that decision comes down to whether the owner of the name can prove the other user is misleading the public.
Citizenhawk makes money with big companies by charging $1,000 a month to hunt down cybersquatters and squashes their Web sites.
Farm subsidy mother lode
For the past several months a number of media companies have drawn attention to the useful Web information found at the Environmental Working Group’s farm subsidy database.
It’s at ewg.org, and while not run by the federal government, it’s become one of the most useful sites to take federal data and help people understand a complex circumstance.
The farm database is found at http://farm.ewg.org/farm/. Once there you can go through a map and find a state or a zip code and search the database to see where the federal farm subsidies end up.
In Kootenai County, for instance, it found growers there collected $19.5 million in subsidies from 1995 to 2005. In 2005, it found Milhorn Farm, Inc. of Worley had the largest single subsidy at $40,213.
For Stevens County in Eastern Washington, the largest subsidy during 2005 was $31,657 given to the Spokane Hutterian Brethren Inc.
The site allows all sorts of ways to slice and dice the numbers. It’s very highly recommended to help people understand how the federal farm subsidy program works.
Idaho wages in one file
Finally, let’s look at the state of Idaho’s new database that shows up-to-date numbers for wages covering 650 different occupations.
That data is at the state’s Labor Market Information System Web site at http://lmi.idaho.gov.
Tables there include total employment for each occupation, the average wage, median wage, and the entry wage. To find the data, go to the Web site, hover over Wages in the left-hand column and click on Wages by Occupations.
What they don’t offer at the LMI site is a search-by-job index. Instead you are obligated to open a large Excel or PDF file and then scan for specific jobs and wages.