(L to R: Leah Culver, Pownce; Rashmi Sinha, Slideshare; Dina Kaplin, blip.tv; Marissa Mayer, Google; Cyan Banister, Zivity; Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Page, BlogHer; Caterina Fake, Flickr; Gina Bianchini, Ning; Kaliya Hamlin, OpenID; Mena Trott, Six Apart; Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post.) Women have been heavily instrumental in redefining the way we interact online. Here's a look at the most influential of these.
Marissa Mayer, Google | Courtesy of Google 
Caterina Fake, formerly of Flickr | Courtesy of Caterina Fake How she got there: Born in Greece, Huffington moved to England at the age of 16, where she attended Cambridge University. After graduating with an MA in Economics, she moved to London where she lived with famed political columnist Bernard Levin and penned her first novel. She moved to New York in 1980 and married politically conservative oil millionaire Michael Huffington in 1986. For the next several years, Huffington was a staunch Republican, though her views noticeably shifted towards the late nineties. In 2003, she ran unsuccessfully as an independent against Arnold Schwarzenegger to replace California Governor Gray Davis, before finally starting the Huffington Post in 2005. "Bringing together people and facilitating interesting conversations has always been part of my life -- thanks to my Greek DNA. With The Huffington Post, the idea was to take those conversations and bring them into cyberspace, creating a one-stop site for news and opinion with an attitude, in real-time," she says.
What to learn from her: Don't always take a medium's so-called limitations at face value. In Huffington's able hand, blogs became primary news sources -- not merely sources of commentary. And aim to conquer your doubts. "Fearlessness is not the absence of fear, it's the mastery of fear," she says. “Overcoming fear is, I think, the most important lesson in terms of achieving success.”
What she does: Recognizing market potential in the primordial instinct to ogle (and be olged), Cyan Banister, co-founder of Zivity.com, turned the Hot-Or-Not phenomenon into a profit-making enterprise as well as an online community. For a subscription of $10 a month, members can vote on -- and connect with -- their favorite models, who submit their own photos and get 40% of the proceeds.
How she got there: A high school dropout, Banister joined the working world when she was just 16. "My school was learning on the job; being surrounded by peers." She has a managerial background, primarily in tech, working at email security provider IronPort Systems. She also worked as the CTO for the Women's Economic Agenda Project for a short stint, where she helped train women in prison or in other disadvantaged positions to develop job skills.
What you can learn from her: You don’t need formal training to launch a successful company. Banister designed her site and conceived of Zivity’s core business model without a traditional educational or business background. Rather than being deterred by how many men you're working with, Banister's advice is to forget your gender. "Take risks and don't focus on yourself too much. You need to stick your neck out there and just do it in order to be successful."
What she does: The co-founder and CEO of Ning, a social networking platform that allows people to create and customize their own social networks, Bianchini was featured on Fast Company's cover earlier this year. Before Ning launched in 2004, users didn't have the ability to fraternize with others who shared their interests in quite the same way, or on the same scale. The site currently has about 575,000 social networks, growing at a rate of about 2000 a day, with new ones from DoodleKisses (a club for Labradoodle and Goldendoodle owners) to Give it to me Raw (a community for oven-shunning vegans.)
How she got there: Bianchini has a BA in political science and an MBA from Stanford. She worked at various jobs in the financial sector -- including a stint at Goldman Sachs -- before founding an ad analytics company called Harmonic Communications, which was bought by ad agency Dentsu. She co-founded Ning with Marc Andreessen, one of Harmonic's board members.
What to learn from her: If you're trying to start a company, remember the two C's: control and customization. While networking platforms existed before Ning, none offered users the same kind of ownership.
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