Shedding light on a situation isn’t always the best method for seeing it more clearly. For example, I suffered the loss of Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper) this year because the light pollution from my creeping metropolis has erased most of the night sky. What good is a patio from which to gaze not upon the light of Kochab and Pherkad, Yildun and Urodelus or even Ahfa al Farkadain, which has traveled up to 480 light years or 2,821,740,179,128,131.5 miles just to say hello, but upon the glaring lights of Volvo and Nissan or Wal-Mart and Sears, which require mere electricity to glow?

But when it comes to trying to navigate your way through a shaky economy and a competitive marketplace (yes, this is a competitive marketplace), the more light the better, even though we know that illumination doesn’t always accentuate the positive. Right, ladies? Nor does it eliminate the negative, does it, guys?

Analysys Mason’s Patrick Kelly’s report this week on the service assurance market shed light on the opportunity there, which is substantial, but it also reminded us that we are a year away, at best, from seeing the start of normalization. You should check out the article and then do your part for normalization and go buy his full report.

A TM Forum report this week also aimed some light at the telecom space. And caught in the glare was revenue assurance. The report showed that organizations are beginning to focus on this area, but it highlighted the perception that the industry lacked the tools to properly manage revenue assurance. Now, those of you in the solutions business know that’s just not right. But it is good to know what the service providers are thinking.

Also this week, Infonetics Research put the spotlight on the down side of the boom in VoIP adoption during a recession. The analyst firm said VoIP toll fraud remains among the fastest-growing problems facing operators today. Without the added illumination, we might focus only on the growth and not see the killer comet coming from behind VoIP star.

When I didn’t like what the glaring lights were doing to my backyard view over the weekend, I simply moved my chair and my little cooler to the front porch. You don’t have that luxury.

E-mail me at heyBOSS@vpico.com or clock on the comment button below.

Advertising used to be an art. Creative men and women — mostly men back in the day — not only told us what was cool and what to buy, they created what we all think is the great American experience. Everything from the modern commercial Christmas to our fascination with cowboys and the open road are figments of some creative ad man’s imagination.

But today, thanks in part to television commercials and e-mail spam, the ad man is the new lawyer; the most despised man in town. And today, he’s just as likely to be a she. This doesn’t make them any less effective. They still tell us our clothes aren’t bright enough, our breath isn’t fresh enough, our performance is lacking and our car doesn’t say enough about us. And we believe them.

However, what used to be an art, a keen and natural instinct for what went on in the minds of fellow humans and a wickedly accurate sense for how to exploit it, is quickly turning into a science instead. Nothing against science, I drink from its cup daily, but the advances in advertising technology are taking the art away from the ad man and giving it to the demographer and the new age data processing specialist, from whom the ad man now takes his direction.

But that’s not the worst part for the now lowly ad man. The techniques used by his new bosses — data mining, behavior analysis and targeting, real-time location information, profiling, social network analysis and information sharing — have caught the ear of lawmakers and privacy advocates who want to take these tools away through privacy legislation.

Why do we care about the lowly ad man, besides all the false but happy memories he has given us? Because the ad man is supposed to support all these newfangled, next-generation services we say we want so much. And because nobody under 30 will pay for these services, we have turned to the ad man for help and offered him our network.

“Sell, ad man. Sell,” we sang as we developed new ad insertion servers and revenue sharing techniques and business models that would pay for themselves. But will they be all for naught when regulators say we can’t use them?

People have told me I am wrong to say, as I have consistently said over the last couple of years, that the advertising model for telecom services is fundamentally flawed. I said this because after a decade in the magazine business, I know that when an economy gets tight, the first thing to go is the advertising. How then, I asked, will revenue be generated from all these free services when advertisers pull back? But that may not be the real flaw.

My critics may have been right, but we may never get a chance to find out for sure. Congress, as we speak, is considering drafting legislation that would make it very hard for ad men and their new data-crunching bosses to use the new tools of their trade out of concerns for privacy.

Their concerns are well founded. But who new our Congress — not held in high esteem themselves — would have the wisdom to identify the real fundamental flaw in the advertising model. And that is, with these tools, ad men have the power to tear apart the very fabric of our lives (thank you, oh ad men of Cotton Incorporated.) They could use these tools to create ads based on who we really are and what we really want and do versus creating ads that make us think we are who they want us to think we are and do what they tell us we want to do. Outrageous!

Now excuse me while Jenny Craig and I go have a Marlboro on top of the butte and wait for the sun to set and my CIALIS to kick in.

E-mail me at heyBOSS@vpico.com.

I still refuse to use Twitter until such time my company drags me kicking and screaming into the 21st century and forces me to adopt the 99 percent silly technology. But I’ll be damned if this week that other 1 percent hasn’t secured the company a place in history. Serious history.

If actual change takes place in Iran, Twitter will be celebrated as the heir of modern journalism. When all else failed, when the Fourth Estate was suppressed and the broader Internet was blocked or monitored and phone calls were too easy to trace and too expensive to make, Twitter stepped out of its clown suit and brought a near revolution to the eyes of the world.

Twittering got so crazy that the State Department stepped in and asked the head Twits not to take their network down for maintenance. It was too important. It was too important – to the whole news watching world. I repeat: Twitter, the inanest of today’s inane social media outlets, the Seinfeld of the communications world, was too important to world affairs to be brought down. The world could not do without it. The world could not get enough of it.

Who gets an endorsement like that? What company – after getting started on a whim less than 40 months ago and incorporated only two years ago – gets a call from the State Department asking them to stay online? Good for them.

I wonder though if Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and/or Jack Dorsey are thinking what a historic moment this is or are they just all a-twitter about the free mega-advertising jolt and endorsement they just got.

Because of Twitter’s role on the international stage this week, even anti-Twitter mules like me (I do have an account but don’t use it) will be forced (in a peer-pressure kind of way) to maintain a Twitter account just for that moment – maybe tomorrow, maybe three years from now – when something affects our corner of the world so significantly we have to get the news out and get it out fast. And Twitter, provided a Johnny-come-lately messaging technology hasn’t replaced it, will put down its squirting flower and its big rubber nose and help inform the world.

I hate what I have seen from Twitter until now. What a fun day to be wrong.

E-mail me at heyBOSS@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.