Meant to link to this story about DoubleClick abandoning its attempts to target individual users on Friday—quite interesting in light of the shrinking ad industry, and the company’s closure of its Canadian branch.

While it promised to be a more effective mechanism to serve ads, privacy advocates rightly complained about what DoubleClick did with the data it collected. My guess: “Intelligent Targeting” was stopped because questionable technology made its service ineffective. Despite that, expect it to reappear in a new, “improved” form.

On the topic of failure, seems unions are having a hard time getting into the tech industry, even though the tough labour market would seem to suggest the market is ripe.

Again, another unsubstantiated opinion: unions wanted in when the money flowed to fatten their coffers, but workers were being pampered by their employees; now that there’s no promise of easy money, the unions are less willingly to risk overstretching themselves with fights in the now cash-poor tech industry.

Workers still want some kind of protection in these brutal times, but the big unions—who seemed immune to the changes wrought by the “Information Economy”—must be flexible and open-minded if they want to help.

Finally, an interesting opinion on a technology I gently mocked a few months ago when the Globe (and others) launched its electronic duplicate of the actual paper.

Oh yeah, it’s my sister’s birthday.