Richard Blumberg

I am Richard Blumberg, an old fart trying to carve out a comfortable niche in this brave new world. I have had an active life in communications, and an unusual blend of experience. Herewith a brief resumé, hitting the high points...

I formed one of the first multi-media production companies in Cincinnati in 1973, when multi-media meant 6 slide projectors, three screens, and an AVL Show Pro 3 to run everything. In 1978, Dale Wolf and Barron Krody and I founded the Wolf Blumberg Krody advertising agency, now simply known as WBK. When I left that company as Executive VP, in 1992, it had become the second largest agency in town. I founded Productivity OnLine the next year, one of the earliest community online services in the city, and one of the first Internet Service Providers. POL continues to muddle along, having changed its name to QueenCity.com; I have not been involved with the operation since 1996.

Over the past four years, I have worked with several high-tech start-ups to define product lines, develop software, and create effective Internet strategies. One of those companies, InterLearn, had some great ideas involving distance learning, and we did some interesting projects for the American Press Institute, NASD, and Yale University, but the company itself lacked the resources to continue and the personnel dispersed. TalkPoint Communications, run by the clever and talented Hoyt Prisock, has a very successful set of web-based presentation products; the company itself was bought last year by CCBN. My most recent project, which ended in April, 2000, was for Digineer, a tremendously talented team of developers bring new vision and innovative performance to the clinical health care industries.

I am something of a techie - more so than is common among ad agency execs. I understand software in some depth, and I'm a barely competent programmer in several different development environments. But I'm basically a writer/communicator, and most of my work through the years has involved writing, strategic plan development, and interface design.

I don't drink, but I do sometimes hang out at the Brew House, voted the "Best Dive in Cincinnati" a couple of years running; they have great lunches, a fantastic Saturday afternoon jam, and good music many nights. I registered the brewhouse.com domain and built a website for them [http://www.brewhouse.com]. It's been a while since it's been updated, but the Brew House doesn't change that much, and it will still give you a pretty good idea of what the place is like.

I am interested in Sanskrit epic literature and have written a brief retelling of my favorite,the Mahabharata [http://wmblake.com/stories/mahabharata]. Recently, I have been involved in study of the Chinese classics, especially the I Ching, and I am working on a new English rendering of that venerable text.

I believe that there are a lot of good ideas in the world. I tend to hear a good idea a little more clearly than some other people and have sometimes been lucky enough to spot a good idea even before the person who voiced it. That ability (plus the peculiar blend of experience) has brought me in on some very interesting decision-making processes. I've learned some from that.

Having a good idea is where it starts, but if that's all you have, it's not worth much. What gives an idea real value is a lot of talented people buying into it. When designers and engineers and worker bees and managers and creators of smart words and revealing pictures all buy into a good idea and commit to making it work in the real world, that's what gives it its ultimate worth. The value I see in the Wiki concept (albeit still in nascent form) is that it makes it relatively easy for a lot of different people to buy into a good idea.

I am mostly retired now, in the sense that I am working on my own projects rather than doing work for hire. I enjoy retirement, and it would take something very interesting to pull me back out again.

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