As a native of a Los Angeles suburb, I’m deeply familiar with the sign that punctuates the Chapparral Hollywood hillsides.   It’s certainly not a work of art; but it is a landmark.

Not many people probably know that the original sign – ironically an advertisement for a housing development – read Hollywoodland.  Dedicated in July 1923, the first letters were each 30 feet wide, 50 feet tall, and studded with 4000 light bulbs.  The developers only intended for the sign to be temporary, but the rise of American cinema in Los Angeles helped turn this advertisement into an attraction.

It didn’t take long before the sign began to be the source of trouble. Suicides, car accidents, vandalism – HOLLYWOOD had it all.   So in the late 1970s several industry moguls – including rocker Alice Cooper and Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner –replaced the deteriorating sign with something more permanent.

So it’s no surprise that so many movie tycoons rushed to rescue the sign again this week. (Hugh Hefner provided nearly $1 million himself.) In many ways, the HOLLYWOOD sign reflects America’s zeitgeist – both past and present: promise land, hope, opportunity, fame, and wealth.  As it turns out, saving HOLLYWOOD is about a whole lot more than saving a sign.

Alex Lundry of TargetPointConsulting shows how scientific-looking charts can suggest outcomes that are nonsensical.  For example, the universe of data you select is critical.  (One of his charts shows that President Obama, when compared to every president going back to McKinley, is the all-time “pirate killer.”  His record is sadly diminished, however, when you go back to Jefferson and Madison.)

Another sin is to mislead people into believing that correlation equals causation.  (Lundry shows a slide that correlates the rise in global temperatures with the rise in the number of pirates on the high seas.)  Lundry’s presentation adds an entertaining corollary to Darrell Huff’s 1954 masterpiece, How to Lie with Statistics.

As the WHWG unveils its new website, we want to acknowledge the Internet’s recent birthday and four decades of online communication.  It’s a tribute to how thoroughly this technology has transformed our lives that most of us don’t think twice about instant communication with dozens, thousands, even millions of people across the globe.

But, in the beginning, Defense Department research manager Bob Taylor didn’t see a budding revolution in his attempt to make electronic correspondence less frustrating.  As he said in an interview recently, “To get in touch with someone in Santa Monica through the computer, I’d sit in front of one terminal, but to do the same thing with someone in Massachusetts, I would have to get up and move over to another terminal.”

He realized he needed a network to connect all of his contacts – and from this a revolution was born. Taylor and countless others after him built the communications world we have today by addressing new needs with the best solution available.

Keeping up with the rapidly changing landscape of telecommunications can be challenging and at times daunting – even for communications professionals. Yet sometimes, in the midst of all the technological flash, it’s necessary to step back. Take stock. Determine what is needed and find the product or strategy that makes life less frustrating and success more likely.

The Internet began as a relatively minor solution to one man’s problems. The transformative part of the story was a decades-long process.  That’s why we are in a constant search for the best solutions to a client’s needs, not the latest mirage of instant revolution.