Each hour we’re featuring a woman we admire who is currently doing amazing work right in the tech/maker/art/science space. There are more women we could write about than hours in the day and soon we’ll be out of time! It is a lot fun and very easy to write these up all day and night – we know we could not include everyone and we hope others around the web posted about them. Post in the comments if you’d like too, that’s what today is all about. We also wanted to celebrate some of our favorite authors (and beyond) that keep up entertained, enlightened and inspired. We had this group here last year and they STILL are rocking, welcome back!

Violet Blue. Violet was a crew member of industrial machine performance art group Survival Research Labs from 1996 to May 2007. She is a top 25 Forbes “Web Celeb” and one of Wired’s “Faces of Innovation.” Blue is regarded as the foremost sexuality and technology futurist and sex-positive pundit in mainstream media (such as The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, Attack of The Show and The Tyra Banks Show).

Margery Conner. Margery Conner joined Reed’s electronics-industry portal, e-inSITE, as a technical editor in 1998 and became editorial director in 1999. She created some of the earliest e-mail newsletters for the electronics industry, including narrowly focused niche newsletters. She also developed a video-on-demand news program for the electronics-OEM market. When EDN magazine absorbed e-inSITE, she moved over to EDN as Technical Editor, Online Initiatives. In addition, she covers the Power Systems beat. She has a BSEE from the University of California—Irvine and 10 years of experience as a design engineer and engineering manager.

Xeni Jardin. Xeni is a tech culture journalist. She is a partner, contributor, and co-editor of the award winning blog Boing Boing. She is executive producer and host of the Webby-honored program Boing Boing Video (formerly Boing Boing TV). » She contributes to broadcast, online, and print venues including Wired and NPR, is a frequently-sought “tech expert” in broadcast news. She rides unicorns and drives cupcakes, likes to rock out, and occasionally floats in spaceships.

Annalee Newitz. Annalee covers the cultural impact of science and technology, such as topics on open source software and hacker subcultures. She writes for many periodicals from Popular Science to Wired, and since 1999 has had a syndicated weekly column called Techsploitation. From 2004-2005 she was a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She is the editor of io9, a Gawker-owned science fiction blog. In 2006 she published a book based on her doctoral research. It’s called Pretend We’re Dead, and it was published by Duke University Press. In early 2007, Seal Press published a collection of essays she co-edited called She’s Such a Geek — it’s about female nerds.

Gina Trapani. Gina is an award-winning author, blogger, and programmer whose work translates cutting-edge technology into insights that boost personal productivity. Gina was the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, the seminal blog which garnered nominations for Blog of the Decade and yielded the best-selling book, Upgrade Your Life, a compendium of the best lessons from the thousands-strong Lifehacker community. Currently Gina is a project director at Expert Labs leading development on ThinkTank, an open source crowdsourcing platform the White House will use.