The world has grown smaller. Not just airlines carrying me around the globe in few days, not just the my regular phone call with a friend in Europe and not just the Internet I love because I can talk about my garden and share ideas with my English, French, Japanese and Australian chat-room friends.

The world has grown smaller and it will seem even more so when video-based mobile phones become common in the next few years. You'll see more up-close and personal than you ever imaged. Much of that is good. The more we communicate the more we understand and appreciate one-another. The bad part is losing jobs. Jobs that are now flowing to lower-cost labor areas leaving too many of us unemployed.

Intenet has provided a subtle but far reaching effect... we no longer need a host of middle-jobs that were held by the intermediaries that facilitated, managed, completed and serviced human intensive jobs. Bank tellers are gone, as are many travel agents. The automobile business, Insurance, Newspapers, Periodicals and many more have been compressed to the bare minimum. Some of these businesses will hang on in that configuration but many will go under. The need they served has been diminished if not gone entirely.

The answer to unemployment is what has made us great and made us the leading economy in the world. The answer is Invention and Innovation.

We are the most creative people on the face of the earth. And when we finish innovating and inventing we're the best marketing and sales people in the world.

I'm not going to tout the NASA or Microsoft - they are both examples of businesses that were brand new fields of endeavor when they began - not because they are not great because they are. I'm not going to talk about them because they don't employ enough people to give you the idea.

Think about all the Financial forms of currency and financial instruments we've innovated that started entire industries. People used to have to pay cash for a house. The 30 year Mortgage was an innovation that sparked the entire home building and owning industry.

Think about a Big Mac. I remember when there were a few scattered Mom & Pop burger joints and MacDonald's started an entire fast food industry.

Cars, Radios, TV's, Computers and over half of the things that you own and use were not part of your parent's world. Medicine, Prescription Drugs, rehabilitation, homes for the elderly and the indigent. It goes on and is so big and so powerful that it has raised the United States above any other place on Earth.

Yes we have job displacement. It is scary and uncomfortable and disruptive to all our lives. But as never before we have the Internet - the largest, most accessible reference library in the history of our species filled with potential ideas and opportunities. This is not some high and mighty techno-snob pronuncement.

In every decade there has been transition that left some unemployed and hired others. But that has been happening since the earliest days of civilization.

In his presentation at our Digital Marketing Symposium, he began with the statement that "There are no god-given Americcan jobs. They're all world jobs and you'd better get used to it." Cold water in the face, yes. Straight talk, yes.

Do I think my friends at the Boilermakers or Transport Workers are going to write HTML code? No!

Do I know there are millions of other equally as lucrative ideas and opportunities? Absolutely. Invention and Innovation... that's what we do best, let's do it again.

Views from Lisa Wellman & Terry Wellman

by Terry Wellman

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