This morning, BoomTown will be onstage at California First Lady Maria Shriver’s well-known Women’s Conference in Long Beach, Calif., to moderate a panel titled “Changing the World Through the Web.”

The panelists include Hollywood actor/producer, Katalyst co-founder and Twitter demigod Ashton Kutcher; Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg; Premal Shah of Kiva.org; and Blue State Digital’s Joe Rospars, who was also new media director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

In other words, as a group, they are all either prettier, smarter or better for the planet than anything I have ginned up so far.

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One word: Shameful.

So, no surprise that Yahoo, which is trying mightily to burnish its image worldwide, quickly apologized for the presence of lap dancers onstage at its Open Hack Day in Taiwan last weekend.

Top Yahoo execs were at the hack event, although it’s not clear if they attended the lap-dancing part of the program, which seems to have a history of this sort of Pussycat-Dolls-meets-geeks tone.

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Last night, BoomTown moderated a really interesting panel for an organization called Girls in Tech, titled “Journalism 2.0 RoundTable.”

Girls in Tech describes itself as a “social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent & influential women.”

With those lofty requirements–combined with the fact that I was a girl when we had yet to land on the moon–I have no idea what I was doing there.

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Oh, it’s the middle of August, so why not report this little tidbit: Former Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy has been appointed to the board of the J. Crew Group, the well-known New York-based specialty retailer.

She is now a CEO-in-Residence at Accel Partners in Silicon Valley, after leaving her longtime job at Google, where she was president of its Asia-Pacific and Latin American operations.

Cassidy was also one of Google’s more visible execs and highest-ranking women leaders, so BoomTown is more interested in where the the 39-year-old will land next as a top exec at a Web operation.

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Eve Ensler, playwright, activist and creator of V-Day, appeared at the the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in late May to talk about the links between what goes into making mobile phones and human rights violations.

There, she shed much needed light on the dire situation in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where some of the worst atrocities are now being committed on the population in a terrible civil war.

She predicted it would get worse without massive international intervention.

Tragically, she was right.

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In a recent onstage interview, Palm’s major investor, Roger McNamee, and I got into a minor tussle over the mirror on the back of the just-launched Pre smartphone and his assertion that ladies in particular would love it.

Take that, reflectively-challenged Apple iPhone!

In any case, Palm is certainly not backing away from the female demographic with its latest commercial, which features an unusually pale woman with a sing-song and vaguely creepy voice.

It feels a lot like an ad for a new shampoo that promises lustrous locks.

All the better to look good in a mirror, presumably.

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Onstage in an interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Eve Ensler shed much-needed light on the dire situation in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ensler’s aim is to end the use of rape as a weapon of war there, in part as a consequence of the region’s coltan trade. Coltan, or columbite tantalite, is a mineral essential to the manufacture of a wide array of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops.

It is well worth hearing about exactly how some of our everyday gadgets come to us at a terrible price.

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At the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, besides interviewing a lot of tech and media muckety-mucks, the All Things Digital staff and friends also got a terrific screening of a new documentary–“Autumn Gem”–by our Webmaster, Adam Tow, and his wife, Rae Chang.

The pair co-produced the project, which explores the extraordinary life of the Chinese revolutionary heroine and women’s rights activist, Qiu Jin.

Even more interesting is what it is like to get an indie film made and distributed in the digital age, which I talked about with Tow and Chang last week.

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San Francisco-based Sugar Media, which specializes in Web sites aimed at women, cut its ties with NBC Universal by buying back its shares and got a Series C funding of $16 million from Sequoia Capitol.

Sequoia has been an existing venture investor, having put $5 million into the start-up in late 2006. NBC, a unit of GE, invested $10 million in 2007.

Sugar, which runs the flagship PopSugar.com site, also announced it has bought video shopping start-up, Shopflick, and had hired its founder and CEO to run a new Los Angeles-based entertainment unit.

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Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, has just been named as the 10th member of the Microsoft board.

The company also announced a quarterly dividend of 13 cents per share, payable June 18, 2009, to shareholders of record on May 21, 2009.

Klawe’s appointment is interesting. She is rather sharp–what a shock–according to her bio, which lists impressive credits as a computer scientist.

More importantly, Klawe said she will try to get Microsoft to focus more on gender issues in the computing industry.

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Last night, I was the master of ceremonies, as I have been for several years, at the laudable annual Astia Awards Dinner, which celebrated venture firms that support women-led companies.

And VC Tim Draper really went above and beyond in showing–quite literally–his support.

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Yesterday, BoomTown was hanging in Hollywood at ContentNext’s EconCeleb’s conference, where I did an onstage Q&A with legendary editor Bonnie Fuller about the massive impact of the Internet on celebrity journalism.

With its instant ability to deliver news, video and more, sites like TMZ, PerezHilton, The Superficial and Yahoo’s omg! have become massive drivers of traffic on the Internet and–despite the saturation–the arena is still growing fast, especially among women users.

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Recently, Julie Wainwright came to visit AllThingsD HQ (also known as BoomTown’s abode) to talk about her newest venture. SmartNow.com, focused on women, 35 to 55.

Wainwright, as most people know, was the former CEO of Web 1.0’s most memorable flameout–Pets.com.

Nonetheless, the longtime Web exec has just launched SmartNow.com.

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As BoomTown argued yesterday in a piece on the landscape of Yahoo if Microsoft completes its purchase of the Internet portal, Yahoo certainly knows how to make online content.

As we wrote: “For all its history, right down to today, even with all these dumb widgets competing for users’ attention, Yahoo continues to natively understand how to to entertain, inform and serve up their own and others content to consumers.”

Case in point, an attractive new site it launched today called Shine, which is aimed at women from their mid-20s to their mid-50s.

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So when I met “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl when she was interviewing me for the CBS News show’s piece on Facebook that aired in January, she told me about a Web site she was working on with a bunch of close women friends in New York.
That site, Wowowow.com–The Women on the Web–is now up and running, aimed at women over 40.

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