Sabine Herold is pretty cool.  She is a political science student, beautiful, and speaks perfect English.  She has also just become the most famous 21-year-old in France.  She's even been called Joan of Arc.  "That is stupid," she says.  "I love Britain.  I love Margaret Thatcher.  I love the way you have overcome the unions and are not afraid to privatize.  I love the way you work so hard.  In France, we have become lazy and staid.  We think only of weekends, holidays and how great we once were."  Maybe there is hope for France, yet.

Salon has an interesting review of Legally Blond 2.  "We can find the next generation of leaders by just looking in the mirror. "  I knew it was funny, but I didn't realize it had a message.  Almost like Reese Witherspoon plays, well, Sabine Herold...

Chris Pirillo goes on an "anti-tablet attack", and Robert Scoble responds...  Chris is saying tablets are not as good as laptops, and not as good as PDAs.  Roberts points out they aren't supposed to replace laptops or PDAs, they serve new markets which weren't served by anything before.  They're both right, which explains why I don't want one (I have a laptop and a PDA :) and why a lot of other people do...

Google has a new program called AdSense, which allows anyone to serve Google ads on their pages.  Essentially Google analyzes your page and determines which "text" ads would be most appropriate for your viewers.  You simply pop some JavaScript into your pages, and poof you're done.  Google pays you for each click-through!

Aaron Swartz has a little tool which shows you which ads Google would display on any page.  Pretty cool.  I messed around with it, but don't worry; I have no plans to host ads :)

In other Google news, they are beta-testing a new version of their toolbar.  It features a pop-up blocker (!) and an auto-fill facility (!!) as well as a "blog this" button for Blogger (!!!)  The Blogger button is proprietary, by the way, it does not use the Blogger API.  (Boo.)  Very cool.

This Echo / RSS thing is heating up.  Tim Jarrett weighs in on the side of common sense.  Dave Winer says he doesn't control RSS, gives a tentative endorsement of Echo, and tries to explain.  For more see Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgirm.  That's enough of that; I'm going to leave it alone until it is real.  Web plumbing is a lot less interesting than web content, anyway.