We have a problem in the country! Our holiday home in the lovely area of Nethybridge has become a paradise for local wildlife. Our neighbours have some lovely little silkie chickens that the kids decided to feed and we now have 10 every day taping on the window expecting fed!

Our biggest problem to date is selective feeding of birds and squirrels. The area is renowned for it’s red squirrel population so we have invested in a little squirrel feeder. So the birds haven’t been left out we bough a nice little bird feeder and a very large (in fact huge) 20kg bag of peanuts.

But there is a problem. Any time we fill up the bird feeder we have the local flock of crows eating them in about 15 minutes. Having spent our hard earned cash on the worlds most expensive nuts I have to say I got more than a little annoyed.
Opening the door and clapping my hands every 20 minutes has also worn thin - so it had to be technology to the answer (of course).

Luckily the bird feeder is close to the decked area of the house - and since there is a set of Bose environmental speaker located on the deck linked to the Sonos system it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out there was a better solution.

Firstly off to the RSPB website to find out if the Carrion Crow had any mortal enemies - I thought owl’s or other birds of prey maybe an option (osprey live close by) But having spent an hour downloading MP3 files nothing moved these little blighters.

But finally on a forum for pest control, one post alerted me to the Goshawk which seems to make killing crows one of their main hobbies.

So downloading this simple MP3 - uploading and reindexing the sonos system and creating a “Kill the crow” playlist it was time to try it out.

I plan to get a little Youtube video this week - but confirmation is it works - approx £2,500 of scarecrow - but lets see if they get used to it!

We are really excited to announce our first ever partnership, which is with the Huffington Post. According to Wikipedia The Huffington Post “…is ranked the most linked-to blog by Technorati, the most visited news weblog by Alexa Internet, and the most influential blog in the world by The Guardian.” So in short we are very excited to have partnered with them. Hubdub will be providing forecasts via our widget which is embedded in all of their tag pages (for example here is John McCain’s tag page). We are currently putting together a widget and API page which will allow other news publishers and blog use this data.Hubdub Adds News Forecasts to The Huffington Post | Hubdub, Sep 2008

You should read the whole article.

It brings a whole new term into play - Cost per Investor (CPI) so I thought I would publicly create this term and ask Google Analytics to report this as a new metric!

Adwords for investment

Investor Wanted - IPhone

Snow flurries have been threatening in the sky but it so far has been pretty clear if not cold. I have been spending a little more time on Hubdub this weekend trying to get my position back on the (friends) leaderboard.

A few predictions have gone my way and I need a few more over the coming days to gain a few HD$.

I will keep you updated!

Photo by Alistair Croll

Alistair (good Scottish name!) Croll at Bitcurrent snapped a great picture of some of the Hubdub marketing material at DEMO 2008.

OK, we did put some copies in the rest rooms just to save taking them back to the UK on the flight. The newspapers went down really well at the conference and were included in the press room.