But what about women who make that kind of leap? There needs to be more stories told like that. I put out a call on Twitter and Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times said she too wants to tell more stories about brave women in technology. We live in an incredible time of cultural, economic and political change made possible by changing technology. That technology is being driven in many cases by women - so whose stories would you suggest we write about here on this blog?

ReadWriteWeb's own Audrey Watters has written about the challenges and upsides of incubating women entrepreneurs.

Perhaps the whole hero-style narrative is a bad idea, unhelpful to community collaboration just like Kaliya Hamlin argues the "war" metaphor is in rhetoric like "the identity war." "I think what is seen as heroic is a narrative of the lone cowboy," Hamlin said to me today. "Teams and communities who foster innovation and achieve together are often not seen and therefor not honored in the same way."

We've written about a number of specific women doing heroic or particularly interesting work in tech here on ReadWriteWeb. Here are 7 of my favorites - please let us know in comments or by email (staff@readwriteweb.com) whose stories are especially compelling that we ought to be writing about. Send them today, tomorrow - and don't stop sending us interesting stories about women, please. Of course there are more ways to have an awesome story than just to quit your job - that's just what got me thinking about this. Please send whatever recommendations you can of women who have great stories that people ought to read.

7 Inspiring Stories

Flickr's Community Manager Says Goodbye

When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr. Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium.

Gina Trapani Starts a New Blog

Lifehacker founder and former lead editor Gina Trapani announced this morning that she's started a new blog called Smarterware.org. She says the new site has "no ads, no digg badges, lots of sentences starting with 'I'." It won't have dozens of posts daily under a rigorous publishing schedule - it will be a place for "stuff that fired off a synapse or two in my head," Trapani says.

HGTV Scores Mega-Blogger Heather Armstrong, Dooce

Home and Garden TV just announced that it has signed Heather Armstrong, author of hyper-popular early blog Dooce.com, to collaborate on unspecified "convergence media" projects.

Is Armstrong a woman in tech? As a trailblazer in the effective use of new publishing technologies, I certainly think she is.

An Inside Look Into Boxee's Systematic UX Overhaul Process

The story of Whitney Hess's work on the very hot service Boxee.

Microsoft Makes Key Hire in Researcher Danah Boyd

Microsoft Research has hired social network researcher danah boyd, probably the most high profile academic in the world focused on the emerging web and its social consequences.

How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.

What Does it Mean to Make 5 Million Maps? Platial's Legacy

It's not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world.

This story, about Di-Ann Eisnor's map publishing service Platial, is one of my favorite stories I've ever written.

Ready for more stories about women doing inspiring things in technology? We'll keep writing them, but we'd love your help discovering them, too.

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht

What makes this an ingenious member engagement tool for Digg, is that sub-par articles with a high number of comments are likely to incite action. In the past, many of us simply ignored the sensationalist stories that plagued the lower echelons of Diggdom. Nevertheless, with trolls being a driving force in the determination of trends, users will find themselves clicking through simply to right the wrongs in the Digg universe. While real-time shopping notifications like Woot's Twitter account incentivize users with deals, Digg knows that its members will keep coming back to maintain a sense of justice. The company will be rolling out the trends feature in the near future.

Hon's vision of the future is sci-fi influenced, cross-platform and web-native. He mocks the "urban games" of online hipsters but believes there will soon be a layer of "Harry Potter ether" that we can dip in and out of while we're walking to work.

Making Books a Different Animal

The Telling Stories project transformed the work of six UK book authors into six different web experiences. Hon said the authors were mainstream writers whose reactions ranged from indifferent to bemused when they were first approached. After participating, all six are now enthusiastic to do more on the web, he said.

Hon's favorite of the six parts was a mystery thriller written about the streets of London that his company transformed into a Google Maps overlay; the map marker became a flying first-person narrator for the bird's-eye readers. Book chapters unfolded as map annotations.

Another author's book was serialized into 140 character abridged lines and delivered over months to followers on Twitter.

The whole Telling Stories project has been applauded as a great example of book publisher Penguin boldly stepping into a new medium. Hon says the authors were assured that visiting emissaries from the internet had not come to destroy them.

The project has brought the authors creative opportunity and substantial exposure. Personalized social serendipity service StumbleUpon has brought in half of the traffic to Telling Stories, Hon says; sometimes up to 10,000 people will Stumble on to the site on a seemingly random day.

Those visitors are encouraged to jump media and buy the full dead-tree version of the web-ified stories. Hon says though that he thinks the division between media types will become much less clear in the near future.

The Future of Stories

This CEO and I didn't talk much about monetization - emergent forms of creativity shaking up the old are more exciting. We didn't tackle the debasement of literature by Twitter because Twitter's awesome potential is more interesting.

We talked just hours after the iPhone OS 3.0 announcement was made and Hon was excited that the new Bluetooth connectivity could mean a vastly improved interface for glucose monitors, for example. He said that developments like this could be the stepping stones toward a future of ubiquitous computing.

"Soon people will realize that there is no 'mobile internet' - there is only the Internet," he says. "And stories are everywhere." Hon says web content today is like the early days of TV, when all anyone could think to do was broadcast actors from the theater in the new medium. But new types of media enable fundamentally new types of content and experiences.

For example, we're just beginning to learn how to leverage the web's social connections, Hon says. He points to the first iteration of "urban games" as something rudimentary that won't last: groups of people organizing online to meet in person dressed, let's say, as Pac-man characters, running through city streets and posting videos of their adventures on YouTube. "Those games ask people to get up and do something they don't really want to do," Hon says.

Instead, he believes that the future of interactive story telling will be pervasive - it will be available throughout your typical day. Walking to work, even while at work.

"I have no idea what we can produce in this medium," he said, "but I think it's going to be like turning the whole world into Disney Land."

Just remember, Dan, how much free time you said you discovered when you quit playing World of Warcraft. Turning the whole world into Disney Land is nothing to take lightly. That said, I'll see you when we meet up in the Harry Potter ether. I won't be surprised if you and your team help build it.