Profile: Meg Hourihan - Feature - Tufts University: "After a childhood spent playing around on her mom's Apple II computer and learning elementary programming languages at school in Brookline, Mass., her early interest in math and science gave way to an emphasis on literature and writing by her senior year of high school.

'By the time I got to Tufts, the only thing I was using a computer for was writing papers, then helping other people format their papers in Microsoft Word,' the English major recalls. While temping after graduation, she found herself working a lot in desktop publishing, mostly due to her skill with Microsoft Word.

When one investment firm decided to post its prospectuses on the web, Hourihan jumped at the chance to teach herself HTML and spearhead the project.

There was no turning back. 'That was it, I was hooked,' she says.

As she moved on to work for a consulting firm, she evangelized about the web being the next step for businesses. Her technological interests finally found their outlet.

'It wasn't until the connectivity of the Web really came along that I realized what was really interesting about it all for me,' she says.

Blogger emerged at the height of the dot-com bubble, and for Hourihan and her hard-working Blogger colleagues, it was a crazy time. Companies sprung up overnight promising 'the next big thing' for the web, and venture capitalists threw funding at them freely."