SheGeeks

I remember the first time I saw the movie Hackers featuring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller. There was just something so fascinating about being able to use lines of codes to get into a system or hack a payphone just by playing a specific sound. It was…cool, but it wasn’t ethical. After watching Hackers I entertained the thought of being a hacker for quite some time.

IZEA recently approached me about a Ethical Hacking course, which made me take a stroll down memory lane. One of SheGeeks’s readers has the chance to become a Certified Ethical Hacker. EC-Council is offering a full iClass package to you valued at $2,995! The package includes the books, lab manual, AND online class.

If you’re working in IT security, secure programming, or data recovery, this could be just what you were looking for! The courses teach and reinforce security fundamentals, ethical hacking, penetration testing, disaster recovery, and secure programming.

UPDATE: Congrats the winner of the Ethical Hacking course, Kaerast! For those that didn’t win, but participated in Ethical Hacker campaign 50% off coupon is available to partake in the Ethical Hacking course. Simply email eric.lopez@eccouncil.org and request your the coupon. Thanks for entering folks!

How To Win 

So how do you win? Simply leave a comment and let me know why you’re a good fit to be the next certified ethical hacker. You can also tweet the following:

“RT @corvida I just entered your contest to become a Certified Ethical Hacker! http://urlbrief.com/98d904 #CEH”

If you’re honestly interested in taking advantage of this opportunity, I encourage you to share your passion for it in the comments below or on Twitter.

Popularity: 57% [?]

I’m currently listening to Louis Gray, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, Melanie Baker (AideRSS), Micah Baldwin (Lijit). They’re all a part of the Beyond Content Aggregation – Finding the Best Content Panel. One of the key things I hope to hear them speak a little more on is filtering and content aggregation. After all, aggregation all of the content available usually results in information overload. In doing so, everyone has various filtering techniques.

Finding Personal Versus Popular Content

While Louis and Robert Scoble may be human filters, services like PostRank and AideRSS are all about helping you get the best content within all the “noise of information”.  However, my problem with said services is that their filtering mechanisms are based on popularity and not necessarily the best personal content.

For personal content aggregation, the aforementioned tools fail me. I don’t want to know what’s the most popular, Techmeme does that for me already. I want to know what’s relevant to me. We need more “relevant filtering services”. Popularity is played out. It’s old and quite frankly, it’s annoying to some extent. Screw popularity. I’ll take relevancy any day!

Q&A

My question to you is: How are you finding the best relevant content? What tools are you using? What manual techniques do you integrate into your search for finding the best content that’s also relevant to you?

Popularity: 17% [?]

To get straight to the point: time!

Can you imagine seeing the following ad in a video you’re trying to view? How about on one of your favorite websites? How would you honestly feel about it? What if you had to watch an ad every time you viewed a video or clicked on a link? Do you really have time for that?

While online video viewing may be increasing, most internet users don’t have the time to sit through yet another commercial while viewing that video. Some of us barely have time to view the video itself.

Ads in Video: Follow Youtube’s Example

For some, commercials signify when it’s time to move on to something. You may or may not come back to whatever you were watching if something more engaging comes along.

However, this is for TV. Would the same apply to web commercials? I wouldn’t look past it. I’d hate to see commercial ads in videos on the web.  Instead, I still love the banner idea. In fact, I enjoy what Youtube does for advertising within videos. They display a small banner that pops up in the “black-space” surrounding videos. They way they’re technically not interrupting your video and you have a “choice” of whether or not to even pay attention to the ad.

Of course, most viewers will at least glance at the ad, so you’re guaranteed more than a few eyeballs. If your ad happens to be in a topic relevant video then surely your chances of clicks increases. Almost everyone wins, and almost everyone is happy.

Video Ads In and Of Themselves

I’d hate to see vieo ads period. They can slow down page loading times. They play when you’d rather them not play. They blast through your speakers while you have music already blaring through them. THEY.ARE.DISTRACTING.AND.ANNOYING.

I understand that it’s tough making money with advertising on sites, but commercial ads are not the solution. At least, not right now.

Popularity: 8% [?]