Blogcritics Author: vinturella

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

How We Will Spend Our Summer Vacation

vinturella — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 20:42:18 EDT

We are on our way to Innsbruck, Austria for the annual UNO summer school there. Susan is the academic director and I will be teaching two courses. My courses are Entrepreneurship, which I have taught many times, and Personal Finance, which I have taught once before. Innsbruck is idyllic. Here is how a travel web site describes it:Innsbruck’s popularity has surged since it hosted the Winter Olympics in 1964 and 1976; it now attracts more North American visitors than any other European ski destination. Claiming the best mountain runs in the Tyrol region, Innsbruck makes an ideal base for visiting smaller Alpine towns. In warmer months, stroll along Maria-Theresien-Strasse in the medieval Old Town, hike past those famous mountain runs, or waltz to the strains of an outdoor concert in the Hofgarten public park. Meanwhile, back home, the New York Times ran an article about the New Orleans recovery entitled “A Legacy of the Storm: Depression and Suicide” (Susan Saulny, June 21, 2006). Here is a brief excerpt: [New Orleans]...is a city where thousands of people are living amid ruins that stretch for miles on end, where the vibrancy of life can be found only along the slivers of land next to the Mississippi. Garbage is piled up, the crime rate has soared, and as of Tuesday the National Guard and the state police were back in the city, patrolling streets that the Police Department has admitted it cannot handle on its own. The reminders of death are everywhere, and the emotional toll is now becoming clear.We were rendered essentially homeless by Hurricane Katrina, currently staying with my mother for an indefinite period. This period is useful while we wait to see “how things go.” This is the phrase used by many area residents; my guess is that it means seeing what happens this hurricane season. Still, it is not about how many hurricanes hit, or how many times we have to evacuate. It is just waiting until about September 30, then measuring a collective reaction. Only then can we make decisions about staying, about whether or not to rebuild, and about where to live. Or, we may just leave the area, retire our hurricane supplies, and live someplace inland. Unfortunately, any other place will seem bland by comparison.

John B. Vinturella, Ph.D. has 40 years experience as a management and strategic consultant and entrepreneur, and 15 of those years as an academic Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Adjunct Professor. Follow the Katrina recovery blog, New Orleans Bulletin, and visit his Entrepreneurship site.

Getting Our Footing Back in New Orleans

vinturella — Mon, 15 May 2006 08:38:22 EDT

By this time next week many of us will be talking about how the New Orleans mayor's race turned out. Is there anything left to be said about it? The candidates have each tried to demonstrate that they have a plan, that theirs is the right one, and that they can get more done than the other fellow. The race has drawn international attention but I don't think this is due to the candidates' titanic struggle. The candidates are both capable gentlemen committed to public service, but the Katrina story dwarfs this race, politics, and the mechanics of governance. A major city in the richest country in the world is crippled, due largely to governmental malfeasance, and aggravated by governmental impotence. The media are baffled as to what today's headline should be, and a mayoral race seems as good a thing as any. The real story doesn't follow the daily news cycle; the gist of it is considerably less tangible than regular progress reports on levee reconstruction and more on the racial composition of the electorate. How do you convey community spirit, frustrations of trying to get anything done, and discouragement caused by the glacial pace of reconstruction? My friends and cohorts are mostly 60-ish and we find ourselves seriously considering leaving the area. Any sense of disloyalty to our hometown is outweighed by the toll of everyday life; this is not the way to spend our golden years.Katrina led us to cashing out our house, furniture and clothing. We evacuated with only what fit in our cars. Like many, we want to see what happens this hurricane season before deciding whether it makes sense to build or buy another house. Many of the people we talk to have adopted a similar wait-and-see attitude. But even then, of course, there will be another hurricane season each year. Still, we need to be spared this season just to get our footing back.

A Safer City

vinturella — Sat, 6 May 2006 23:26:40 EDT

We are maintaining a recovery index on post-Katrina New Orleans, and are staying with our estimate of the last two months at 35 percent. While the population has crept up over 35 percent of its pre-Katrina count, we feel as though services have not kept up. Of greater concern is that crime seems to be back in New Orleans after a too-brief reprieve.New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) Superintendent Warren Riley announced the city's first-quarter crime statistics on Friday. He asserts that, even though crime in New Orleans has risen as the population has grown, the city is still much safer than it was before Hurricane Katrina. Anticipating the argument that the decrease was insignificant because population is dramatically down in the city, Riley produced figures that he said show that even adjusting for the lower population, violent crime is still down about 26 percent from the first quarter of 2005. Criminologist Peter Scharf reflects the skepticism of a public that has long distrusted police crime statistics. "If this is Pleasantville," Scharf said of New Orleans, "we're in deep trouble."Is this Pleasantville? From 2002 through when Katrina hit the city in 2005, New Orleans' murder rate was nearly eight times the national average, and the highest per capita city homicide rate in the United States. For perspective, New Orleans averaged about 59 people killed per year per 100,000 citizen, compared to New York City's seven. Are we "under-policed?" Before Katrina the city had about 1,450 police for a population of about 460,000 or about 3.2 officers per 1,000 residents. This compares to a national average of 2.3, and an average for larger cities of about 2.8. Currently there are about 1,200 police for a population of about 180,000 or about 6.7 officers per 1,000 residents. While it is estimated that 80 percent of city cops lost their homes to Katrina, NOPD still seems to be functioning better than the rest of New Orleans' criminal justice system.Criminal Court is not expected to reopen for another month. Work on the state prosecutor's building, police headquarters and other facilities has not yet begun. Only one of the city's 10 jails is fully functional. NOPD's temporary headquarters is a collection of trailers at a vehicle inspection station. We will keep you posted.

New Orleans Mayor Weathers the Storm

vinturella — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:03:05 EDT

Phase one of the contest for Mayor of New Orleans turned out pretty much as has been predicted for weeks now. Also predictable was the theme of the runoff. Peter Whoriskey of the Washington Post notes that "Incumbent, Challenger Call for an End to Racial Divisiveness."And public statements by the two remaining candidates will probably try to keep any such divisiveness out of the public eye. Still I am fairly certain that there will be some discussion about one or both candidates using "the race card." "Black voters are coming back to (Mayor Ray) Nagin, not necessarily as a person but as a symbol of a racial regime," said Susan Howell, a pollster and professor at the University of New Orleans. "And in blunt terms, some white voters see this as an opportunity to take back power."This movement of the electorate, an inversion of the incumbent's base from predominantly white to strongly black, may be unprecedented. Nagin, an African-American, rode in on the support of the largely white business community. Campaign finance reports show that this group has deserted him for, primarily, his major white competitors.And now there are two candidates. Challenger Mitch Landrieu is a ten-year state legislator currently serving as Louisiana's Lieutenant Governor. LG has largely been a ceremonial post, but Landrieu has been an energetic promoter of the state's culture, recreation, and tourism. Adding a little spice to the runoff, Mitch is the son of a former mayor; "Moon" Landrieu was the City's last white mayor, leaving office in 1978. Moon was also the first New Orleans mayor to appoint African-Americans to significant positions in City government, and is still revered in the local black community.Third-place finisher Ron Forman's voters, almost exclusively concentrated in white precincts, are likely to go to Mitch. But the Landrieu name still resonates with black voters; Mitch apparently picked up as much as 20 percent of the vote in black precincts, according to analysts on local television stations. Ray Nagin, however, did somewhat better than expected. His appeal for unity after the results were in was classic Nagin: "If we don't come together as men and women, we will perish as fools." Let me know your views on the campaign and the candidates, as we follow the story for four more weeks.

Voting and Katrina

vinturella — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 12:43:26 EST

... Katrina. This is how we get our news. Sometimes the Katrina effect is discussed directly; more often it is only implied. But it is a factor in every story, ranging from how we could have avoided it to what we are doing to stop the next storm. The latest news about voting in the upcoming New Orleans' elections may not mention Katrina directly, but the impact of the storm created a situation where a lot of well-minded citizens come down on opposite sides of several questions. Unfortunately, the differentiator between these groups is race. New Orleans was about 70 percent black before Katrina, and fewer than half of the city's 465,000 inhabitants before the storm have come back.The situation is unprecedented. Could you have imagined delaying a municipal election? What about letting people vote in ten other parishes in an election that directly affects only Orleans parish? And the majority of African-American votes are likely to come from Houston. Many of the voters live outside the City and have no intention of returning. The arbiter in discussions relating to the fairness of elections is the U.S. Justice Department, and they have approved Louisiana's plans for New Orleans' first post-hurricane municipal election next month. The department approved the state's attempts to locate hundreds of thousands of displaced voters with full-page newspaper ads nationwide, to make mail-in voting easy and to relocate polling precincts.The Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH Coalition is protesting the decision, and Jackson has called for satellite polling stations to be set up in 44 states. However, Louisiana opted not to open polling stations outside the state, the Washington Times reported.The April 22 ballot is complex, with 116 people running for 20 positions. More than 20 candidates are challenging Mayor Ray Nagin, and the seven sitting City Council members all drew opposition.One of Nagin's challengers is Orleans Clerk of Court Kimberly Butler who, as Clerk, is responsible for the logistics of election-day voting within the City. She has been less than confidence-inspiring; Council president Oliver Thomas said he prays every night that Butler can pull off a successful election.My wife and son and I have previously voted near our house in New Orleans East. With all the damage in that area we expect that we will vote this time at one of the so-called "super-sites."

Disequilibrium: Report From New Orleans

vinturella — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 19:00:48 EST

As we near the end of March, we are getting very concerned about moving into our new living quarters in Metairie. We have scheduled a moving date of March 31, but our confidence that the place will be move-in ready decreases each day. Early in each of the three previous months we were also told that we could schedule the move for the end of that month.Our story is far from unique. Builders are overbooked, skilled workers are hard to find, and suppliers of construction materials are having trouble keeping up with demand.Businesses are reopening or staying open with fewer employees than they had, and generally far less than they need. Food service is particularly affected; it is hard to find a place to eat that does not have a "help wanted" sign. There is not a shortage of workers wanting to come to the area, just nowhere for them to live. Restaurants are adapting to the new reality by cutting hours, limiting their menus, and apologizing for bad service.Public sector functions are similarly hard to staff, while budgets are turned upside-down. The effects of this are easy to find. Four-way stops do not work nearly as efficiently as traffic lights. Gaping holes in city streets make it seem as though you are driving an obstacle course; private citizens, being good neighbors, are spray-painting the edges of the crevasses. A new equilibrium must be established between supply and demand. I am afraid that New Orleans will no longer be an inexpensive place to live. Positive signs of the recovery abound as well. The public area of the city is quite lively, convention business is picking up. New flights are being added. Many houses are beginning to come on line. Utilities are back for the most part.For this progress to be sustained, we need to know the rebuilding "rules," such as elevation requirements for construction, availability and cost of insurance, and what form the new City "footprint" will take.We need to watch this mayor's race closely to see which candidate we trust most to accelerate what has been a sluggish recovery so far.

Life Begins at 55 (Part One of Three)

vinturella — Wed, 8 Mar 2006 12:12:18 EST

When I sold my business, at the age of 55, I felt liberated. Now I could do all those things that seemed so interesting, but were denied me by the "ball and chain" of small-business ownership. Sure, in those twenty years, I had some concurrent professional activities going on. For much of the last fifteen I was a roving adjunct professor, and an occasional consultant. There were even a couple of full-time jobs in there, where frequent phone calls to, and most Saturdays at my business had to be enough to impart my unique brand of management. So, I am available world! Or at least the greater New Orleans area. Several months of clearing up my backlog of miscellany were rather pleasant, and then the call came. President of a local economic development agency? That sounds good to me. But I soon found out what a come-down it was from business owner/executive to political whipping-boy. Thanks for the opportunity, but I would just as soon stay home. After another pleasant interlude of a few months, another call came. Scholar-in-Residence at a local university sounds great! And it was a pleasant two years, including one semester as a visiting scholar in New York. But financial exigency did me in. Last hired becomes first fired. Well, I did mouth-off a little too much about the administration's shortcomings, but I am pretty sure it was the cash crunch that cost me the job. It was the summer of my discontent. My backlog was so cleared up that I was killing time with a blunt instrument. The local economy had softened a bit, and there were no jobs to be found that came even close to the level of income and importance to which I had become accustomed. So, how is this for an idea? Study for an MBA! I was only 60 years old then, so it should be worth the investment. I had been teaching entrepreneurship at several local business schools, so it was time that I should get my first business degree. My 35-year-old Ph.D. in engineering had pretty much expired by then.At 62, in August 2005, I received the MBA and checked out the job market for a week or so until Katrina arrived. We evacuated in time, spent about three weeks on the road, and settled in Columbus Ohio for about three months. In Columbus, Ohio State was very welcoming toward Katrina refugees and we were given professor offices, Susan in Political Science, mine in business. Other courtesies were extended to us through the end of the fall quarter. The temporary nature of the Columbus stay eased the pressure to find gainful employment there. On our return, though, it would be time to peddle my new MBA.More coming soon.

Blogger to "Score" New Orleans Recovery

vinturella — Wed, 8 Mar 2006 04:30:06 EST

There are a few metrics that give us a sense of where New Orleans stands relative to a half-year ago before Katrina. The Times-Picayune tells us that population is at 41% in the City, then gives other measures for the metro area: the labor force is at 68%; 91% of hotels are open, though many rooms are occupied by locals at FEMA's expense. Restaurants are estimated at 37%, while hospital beds are at 50%. Would it be useful to have one number that represents a composite of the measurables, with a lot of informed subjectivity? Dr. John Vinturella calls that number the Hospitality Index (HI), and suggests that it represents how New Orleans is faring in terms of its "hospitality" toward people who live in the City, those that expect to return, and other visitors. Dr. Vinturella lost two houses and a car in the storm, but assures us that his loved ones are well and that he was adequately insured (assuming that the insurers will eventually pay reasonable claims). With all the misery inflicted by the storm, Dr. Vinturella feels personally lucky, a victim of only "massive inconvenience." The informed subjectivity comes from his experiences as an "urban warrior," fighting his way through packed streets looking for a grocery, a gym, a dry cleaner, a barbershop, and a restaurant where wait time is less than an hour. All the while he is living in an unfamiliar part of town and paying exorbitant rent. The HI may be thought of as a measure of how inviting and supportive the City feels to its constituents relative to some norm representing New Orleans before the storm. We hope that, on some characteristics, the Index can exceed 100%, that is, where performance in some categories is better than before the storm. Ethics in government and effectiveness of the public school system come immediately to mind. The Index will be maintained by Dr. Vinturella on his blog nobulletin, nicknamed "NOBull." For HI to remain useful, Dr. Vinturella needs a lot of input from his readers on businesses closed and open, the rental and purchase housing markets, and services weak and strong, particularly in the public sector. You can email observations and anecdotes to Dr. Vinturella. "The impact of Katrina can be better understood 'on the ground.' Imagine, after six months, that related stories totally dominate the news. Mail delivery is not yet daily, and only first-class mail is being delivered in the City. 'How did you do in the storm?' is still the City's most frequently asked question." NOBull is updated on Sundays and Thursdays.

Katrina: Unexpected Consequences

vinturella — Sun, 5 Feb 2006 01:12:43 EST

We just moved into our ninth address since evacuating New Orleans on August 27, just ahead of Katrina. This does not even count one-night hotel stays. Qualify it by stays of a week or more and it is our fourth place, with plans to move to the fifth in the next month or so. We expect that our next address, on Scofield St. in Metairie, will be longer-term but there are no guarantees. We left Columbus, Ohio just before Christmas expecting that Scofield would be ready in a week or two. Well, a week or two became a month or two. Thanks to the craziness of the New Orleans housing situation, we had a one-month lease at our first stop back, a pool house just off Panola St. in N.O. So now we have a two-month lease on Cherokee St. in N.O., hoping that our builder's ability to project completion dates is improving with time. Cherokee is a nice apartment, and our son is back staying with us for the first time since the storm. We might get comfortable here if we could afford the rent.Katrina has immeasurably changed our direction and perception. Before the storm we lived in our dream house, but now we yearn for a simpler life. We have liquidated (liquified?) our real-estate portfolio, and may never own another house. Susan is beginning to consider retiring soon. I am beginning to treat my "between assignments" status as a longer-term semi-retirement. Every day the logistical difficulties of living in N.O. rear their ugly head, from traffic jams to crowded stores to other drags on productivity coming at us from every direction. Every day we find ourselves nudging ahead a little bit in the insurance wars; trying to simply get a fair settlement feels like a half-time job.And we are among the luckiest. Our loved ones are fine, and we were adequately insured. We just suffered a massive inconvenience. Edited: [GH]

"State-of-the-art" in Internet marketing ...

vinturella — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 21:13:27 EDT

This is a continuation of an interview where Jay Beavy of the Second Fortune blog on Internet marketing (IM) asks questions of John Vinturella, author of Release Your Inner Entrepreneur (RYIE). How would you assess the "state-of-the-art" in Internet marketing?I think that in some ways we are entering a more constructive period in IM. Search engines are leading us full-circle, back to where sites are recognized for quality of content. We are leaving a period of intense reliance on the ability of SEOs (search engine optimizers) to "game" our site to prominence. At the risk of sounding like an old-timer (which, I guess, I am), there was a time before the Web, when the 'Net was a text-only medium. If the dialer worked, and the phone at the other end answered, and the sounds of establishing a "ppp connection" were favorable, then, we could explore, for example, Tulane University's Gopher site. (Show of hands, who remembers Gopher?)A site was basically a directory of documents, and the documents were generally current and authoritative or their authors would not have bothered to upload them. Lists of useful links were precious, and search engines were just beginning to find their footing. Once the Web made the Internet sufficiently user-friendly, online documents proliferated. Search engines, rather primitive by today's standards, took on importance as guides to this wide array of information. And businesses began to see the commercial potential of the new medium. A new industry was born, SEO, to figure out how to gain top positions on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). For a while, keywords were everything. Here is a quick course in SEO:Figure out the words or phrases your prospective customers are likely to use, and find out how stiff the competition is for them. Narrow your efforts to those with the best "Keyword Effectiveness Indicators"(KEIs). Skillfully craft meta statements. Sprinkle your keywords through your text, heavier at the beginning and end, to the proper "density." Use them in your links and image "alts." Decide which is more appropriate, a large number of themed pages or a "mininet." Once your "on-page" factors are in good shape, work on the "off-page" component. Trade links with related pages, use your keywords in the links back, vary the text of the links. Author and distribute articles ...The process has gotten a bit more rational recently but new skills are being required all the time. Can you build a Google site map? Do you "get" RSS? Off-page factors are in ascendancy. Link popularity is important, because it is presumed that quality content drives links. This presumption may be a bit shaky, but we sooo... want to believe it. Sure, there are games still being played. The level of fear that many IM practitioners feel about writing an article is second only to the fear of having to present it in public. So we have software available for compiling our blogs automatically from RSS feeds. And the search engines are getting smart enough to tell authored text from that which is merely "scraped.""Fire sales" and giveaways are putting volumes of poorly written and outdated material in the hands of thousands of IMers bent on cashing in on resell rights, and distributing parts of them as original articles. And article directories are increasingly using human editors to qualify contributed material. More next time...