Time to break the blog block with a delightful rendition of Gaga's Poker Face played on a musical Tesla coil. Coincidentally, Mother Monster's new album is 99 cents on Amazon today, and she's starring in a fantastic new Google Chrome commercial.

Increasing female leadership isn't just about evening out the numbers or equal rights. Layar co-founder Claire Boonstra argues competitive companies and sustainable governments today demand it. She writes:

To my (and Layar’s) opinion, modern leadership has a lot of feminine elements. It is not so much about power, control, top-down thinking and ego, but much more about inclusiveness, intuition, the will to move ahead, looking for win-win (for both parties) rather than ‘I win, you lose’. Today’s society is changing and moving so quickly – top-down thinking and leadership based purely on ratio is not sustainable. Organizations sticking to old principles and old styles of leadership will simply be bypassed by fast movers and disruptors.

Finally, on a lighter, Mad Men style note, This Recording's hilarious essay written for women trying to make it in a boys' club rang all sorts of bells for me. There are so many quotes worth pulling here, but let's go with this one, which dovetails nicely with Sandberg's "Sit at the table" bit:

Drive It Like You Stole It. Be the best. That is, assuming that you are the best. Be the best you can possibly be, whatever that means to you. Absolutely do not step down in order to not threaten people. Don't apologize. If you genuinely f*cked up fine, you are allowed to apologize once but then stop apologizing. Think about how much you hear women apologizing for themselves for no reason, or being self-deprecating or self-abnegating out of habit. What the f*ck are you apologizing for? For being too good?

(Thanks, Amy.)

I don't often discuss being a woman in technology; I'd rather just do something good and let that speak for itself. But when successful women have great advice for other women, it's criminal not to share it.

Last week Leo Laporte did a Gov 2.0 special show on TWiT with Tim O'Reilly and Jennifer Pahlka, a must-listen for programmers who want to use their skills to make the world a better place. It opened with this Code for America spot, which features Tim, Mark Zuckerberg, Caterina Fake, and Biz Stone. The Code for America fellowship application deadline has passed, but if you want to use your coding skills to help our government make better policy decisions, you can do so by contributing to ThinkUp.

Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled "The Real Life Social Network." The 224 slides, embedded below, describe some of the problems and common user behavior on existing social web sites, and suggest how to better design that experience. While the presentation is targeted towards businesses who want to use social media to get their message out, it also serves as a roadmap for what Google will attempt to do with Google Me.

According to Adams, the biggest problem for users on social networks like Facebook is that all your "friends" are in one big bucket. Unlike real life, there's no way to differentiate how you act and interact with different groups of people in your life. When you go to Mom's house on Thanksgiving you behave differently than when you're at Hooters with your college friends, but online all those people appear on a single friends list.

Adams also differentiates between strong ties (the 2-4 people you call on the phone at least once a week), weak ties (friends of friends, the co-worker who's two cubicles down) and temporary ties (the person you're buying a cup of coffee from). Collapsing all these different groups and relationships into a single context--like Facebook--and combining them with the permanence of the internet can lead to a lot of awkward situations. Like Debbie, the girls swim coach who realized, to her horror, that her 10-year-old swimmers could see her commenting on wild photos from the gay bar where her adult friends work.

The entire slideshow is embedded above. Adams also compiled reference links in a blog post here: The data behind The Real Life Social Network.