Girl Geeks

I realize this item is a week old, but I'm just catching up with a pile of stuff in my feeds. CNET published a list of the "Top Ten Girl Geeks." It goes without saying, of course, that no one is compiling a "Top Ten Boy Geeks" list, but if anyone did, would the list consist of five dead people (Ada Byron, d. 1852; Grace Hopper, d. 1992; Rosalind Franklin, d. 1958; Mary Shelley, d. 1851; Marie Curie, d. 1934), including two dead for 150 years, one fictional character, a "borderline autistic" actor whose claim to fame is playing an android prostitute, and a dumb-as-a-post perennial bad joke like Paris Hilton?

According to this list, almost no women have made any geekly impact in the current century. After all, the blogosphere has hardly any girl geeks, right? And apparently, CNET has forgotten its own history.  That's just a few web-related girl geeks off the top of my head--surely CNET can do better.

Comments

[C]

Yeah. That really is a weird list. I really don't understand why anyone gives a $@#& about Paris Hilton.

Your links are interesting. I would be pretty clueless about other bloggers. I have to go back and look more. I had no idea ebay was run by a woman. Gee, you would think they would pick her at least?

[AppleFoot]

Many bloggers posted lists of girl geeks that would've been better than CNet's. Esther Dyson came up on just about everybody's list. Among the names I suggest are Mena Trott (she co-founded and runs Six Apart, which brings you such fine blogging products as Movable Type, TypePad, and --via acquisition-- LiveJournal), Meg Hourihan (she co-founded Pyra Labs, which developed the Blogger software), Caterina Fake (co-founded Flickr), and Gina Trapani (edits software & productivity blog Lifehacker).