This year, according to predictions – and not necessarily of the divine persuasion – is set to become the year of the “consumer evangelists”. The meaning of evangelism is: bringing good news. And just as religious evangelists aim to persuade people to adopt a certain set of beliefs, so consumer evangelists can push buyers, through their belief in a product or service, to buy or adopt it.

If you have not yet heard the term consumer evangelists, then don’t worry because you probably soon will. Evangelism marketing has been described as an advanced form of word-of-mouth marketing. The way it works is that firms develop customers and specialists in their particular field who believe so strongly in a particular product or service that they freely attempt to persuade people to buy it. Note: they don’t simply like a product, they love it and almost seem to believe that life cannot go on without it. The customers essentially become voluntary advocates on behalf of the company who spread awareness.

Evangelism marketers make their recommendations and in effect recruit new customers based on an authentic belief in the product, and not because they receive any form of compensation. The evangelist sees his role as providing benefit to people by providing a neutral, but positive, opinion of the product. He is not paid by the firm or associated with it, and as a result their beliefs are viewed as being credible and trustworthy when members of the public are searching for information regarding a certain issue or problem. Because they are independent and impartial, evangelists are frequently able to bring about widespread influence in certain areas of business.

And in the era of social networks with easy inter-communication the views of evangelists are easy to find. Through the use of Facebook’s ‘Likes’ or Twitter’s ‘re-tweet’, surfers are able to boost readership of evangelist’s comments instantly.

How do evangelists go about converting people? A quick look at the characteristics of the blogs and other articles they create show that their work is similar to that of journalists and marketing communications professionals. They are essentially communicators and connectors. And they are also defenders of the product when criticism arises. Unlike customer services representatives, however, evangelists will not make attempts to hide the deficiencies. They will discuss them and be totally open about them.

Their first rule is to make the information simple and easy to understand. In an era of information overload, consumers don’t have time to waste. They want to know what the product or service is and, rule number two, how exactly it improves their lives. What solution or value does it provide is the third rule. Fourthly, evangelists, as with their religious counterparts who regale audiences with the ways of the Lord, there must be lots of stories. Note: no exaggerations or miracle tales that might be hard for some to swallow. Simply stories of how people derive real benefit from using the product.

Rule five: a monotonous, purely details-oriented article is about as interesting as an instruction manual. And just like the instruction manuals we have all received with every electronic product we have ever bought, it will stay untouched, unopened and unread. So, evangelists typically aim to make it sexy. They use language that causes an emotional reaction. Does it captivate, is it compelling? There’s a fine line between making text strong and keeping it believable, so evangelists aim for the latter rather than the former.

And, because communication is an ongoing, never-ending process, so evangelists are continuously updating material. The moment they stop is the moment the product’s competitors pass them by.

Perhaps the perfect example of consumer evangelism relates to the range of Apple products, and iPads in particular. Ironically, Apple does not have to spend vast amounts of money advertising iPads because the world is continuously talking about them. On any particular day, there are articles relating to iPads, or even Apple’s stock price. It’s good to be associated with Apple because the company will bring you publicity. And so a little-known financial analyst from a small company achieved global coverage by being the first to forecast the company’s stock would hit $1,000 in the coming years from around $600 per share now.

Indeed, so strong is the Apple brand that even news that for other companies would be a public relations disaster bounces off Apple and has little effect. The New York Times ran a front page investigative piece on January 26 under the headline “In China, Human Costs are Built into an iPad” detailing how an Apple supplier in China was making employees work more than the legal number of hours. And the outcome? It appears that people have simply accepted that iPads will cost more in the future because the workers will have to receive higher wages.

Praise the Lord.

This may be a bit presumptuous on my part, but I’d like to try and speak on behalf of those who did not know Howard well, who knew him, as it were, from a certain distance, and who, in spite of that observation, feel that they will miss him.

Was he really almost 87 years old? Hard to believe. Whenever I encountered Howard, usually at trade shows, first in Tucson and later always in June, at JCK in Las Vegas, he would be on his feet, standing behind his and Gail’s table, on “Association Row” in the upper lobby, at the entrance of the Sands’ Convention Center. Standing, not sitting down, conversing in his typically soft voice with passers-by: jewelry retailers, gemstone buyers, exhibitors from the nearby AGTA pavilion, acquaintances, journalists and communications people, such as myself.

Howard looked directly at you, with those inquisitive, bright eyes behind those large glasses of his. He saw you. He clearly also immediately knew if you were for real or just ‘pretend.’

I remember the first time he took me through his GemDialogue. Right there at the bustling, noisy corridor, on “Association Row.” I felt I had no time, needed to move on. But Howard gave me my time, created the lull I needed to understand and appreciate his passion. It was an inspiring and instructive interlude. Of course, many other times, I would just pass by, but we always would nod, greet, from a distance.

In the Jewish tradition, on the 30th day of someone’s passing, a memorial gathering is common. Also, in our lore, we say “May his memory be a blessing.” Let us remember Howard, and feel blessed that we knew him, just a little, from a close distance.

Ya’akov Almor
February 16, 2012

The social media has taken over the lives of so many of us. We like, we tweet, we retweet, we friend, we follow, and we upload photos, video and audio. But do we know the legal limitations, and where we may be breaking the law on libel, invasion of privacy, copyright, music piracy and slander?

It’s reasonable to assume that people who make their living from the media will have an understanding of these issues. Meanwhile, simple common sense, good judgement and taste will ensure that many people won’t use social media in an illegal manner. But do the general public, and young people in particular, for whom communicating via these means is an ongoing daily occurrence, know where the limits lie?

If the results of a recent study by Nominet, which runs Britain’s web infrastructure, are to be believed, the dangers presented by the ease of use of social media are many and widespread. The survey found that just 44 percent of regular Internet users were able to identify a series of potential legal problems, and just 30 percent of those surveyed understood what could be regarded as a libelous message.

Extraordinary as it may sound, half of users did not see any danger in hacking Facebook accounts to make postings or read private messages. Meanwhile, up to 75 percent would risk breaking copyright laws by uploading pictures or songs, and almost 50 percent would have no problem uploading a video filmed illegally at a concert onto YouTube. And in the sphere of online trading, around half did not consider that selling fake designer labels on eBay was a problem.

Of even more concern, the study found that just one-third of respondents believed that calls to violence, such as those encouraging the riots that broke out in London and other cities last summer, would be illegal. That awareness fell to as low as 8 percent among those surveyed in the 16-24 age group. Despite the many news reports illustrating how social media were used to spread awareness and encouragement of the violence in Britain and the widespread looting that took place as a result, approximately 30 percent did not realize that sending out such messages was illegal.

Social media are also being used to bypass the inability of the media to report on certain issues. Indeed, they point to the irrelevance of news organizations in some situations, such as showing the brutality of security forces in putting down demonstrations, as happened in several Middle East countries throughout 2011.

But what happens when social media users provide information that media outlets are banned from publishing due to court orders. In Britain, there was an explicit example this year when the media were unable to report the details of a so-called celebrity “superinjunction” where a soccer player tried to prevent details of an affair being published. However, the name of the sportsman and the woman with whom he had the affair were so widely tweeted that the court’s gag order on the media was rendered irrelevant.

And the results of the Nominet survey showed why this was the case: two-thirds of respondents said they would consider posting a message on Twitter openly defying a court injunction. And just one-third understood that it would be illegal to “retweet” such a message.

To say that social media have changed many peoples’ lives would be a statement of the obvious. But is it right that a teenager with a cellphone hearing a rumor can be a news source, while a trained journalist must stay quiet knowing that a jail term could await? Free speech activists would almost certainly justify this anomaly, but consider the damage caused if the rumor is without foundation. It’s not for nothing that the verb “untweet” does not exist.

Social media have opened up a huge world of opportunities and communication to companies and individuals alike. But is it time to emphasize the dangers inherent and the need to be cautious in the messages being sent out?

For people of a certain age, who started out in the profession in the 1980s or earlier, looking back through the archives was a time-consuming task. Starting out on a weekly in a sleepy provincial town, getting the background to an article was either the result of asking the long-serving News Editor, or going to the filing cabinets and hoping that whoever was there last had put the cut-out articles glued to a piece of typing paper back in alphabetical order.

Moving from a weekly newspaper to a daily, however, was like a breath of fresh air. A bigger operation has more resources, and a dedicated library with staff who would find the article for you. It took an hour or two, but you would eventually receive it. However, the deadline at a daily paper, in contrast to the more relaxed atmosphere at a weekly paper or magazine, meant you could not afford to wait that long. As a result, unpleasant arguments and the pulling of strings were a near-daily occurrence.

Today, even the pedestrian weekly newspaper has gone digital. The papers are still printed, but with all articles and pictures saved on computerized systems, they are easily retrievable. Type in a keyword and the articles appear in a jiffy. And if you are searching for information for a new article, then a quick Google search provides you with a wealth of data in a second or less. What would today’s journalists make of an early-morning newsroom of yester-year where reporters are energetically riffling through the pages for news they may have missed or items that they could take as the basis for a new article? One shudders to think of the ridicule that would have come our way.

We could, of course, explain to the journalists who went before us that today’s way of working is the only means of ensuring that real-time news can be posted vital seconds before our competitors get news to market. But then, they would point out, they also faced a daily battle to get the news out first on to news wires, to radio and TV stations, and on the front pages.

Journalists and writers who started out 20-30 years ago are stuck in a schizophrenic bind having worked at the tail-end of the old way of producing news and being part of the new computerized systems. We look back wistfully to the days when cut and paste were not defined by Ctrl C and Ctrl V, but rather by a typesetting company employee cutting the photographic paper on which text and photographs were printed and pasting them on a blank grid representing a page of the newspaper.

Today, by contrast, several articles, enough to fill a page, can be produced in a fraction of the time previously needed, while page design programs allow us to create the finished product in an hour or less. Newsrooms with tens of reporters have doubtless been slashed back, while typesetting and production departments have disappeared. Would we swap the convenience of being just a few clicks away from background information that can save us valuable time? Are we willing to wait hours or days to provide readers with printed news when today’s demand for almost instant, real-time news, aided by relatively easy to use back-office systems enable us to have an item online within minutes of having written it?

The question is actually essentially meaningless because as with every other business, including diamonds and jewelry, time has moved on, working methods have evolved in ways that were unthinkable even a generation ago, and there’s no going back. Unfortunately, whoever does not evolve simply dies.

Can news be delivered any quicker than today’s real-time news? I’ll let you know in 20 years.

Tipping points happen in every sphere of human activity. In politics and warfare, mighty empires, which first are attacked at the edges, eventually crumble as confidence grows among the rebels that they can defeat the Emperor. As rulers in the Middle East have seen this year, there is a point at which they can no longer rule their peoples through overwhelming force. And when that critical moment is reached, their days are numbered.

Similarly, in business, companies that once were mighty see their products lose relevance as leaner newcomers produce improved versions. Sales fall and the company joins the many other former giants in their field. Who would have thought a generation ago, for example, that we would ever stop needing Eastman Kodak films for our cameras? Today, in the digital age, the company is desperately trying to raise close to a billion dollars just to keep operating.

And in sport, the cycles of rise, decline and fall are also well known. England gave the world, and particularly the countries that were once part of its huge empire, four great sports: soccer, rugby, cricket and tennis. Today, it finds itself without any winners in those sports, and well down on the international list of rankings. And why do teams in all sports at every level that have dominated for so long start a long decline at a certain point and new teams rise and spend a generation at the top before also declining?

In the diamond business, too, companies rise and fall. And the role of national diamond industries also undergoes change. Countries that once led the way in diamond polishing, such as Israel and Belgium, are now trading centers whose manufacturing facilities have largely disappeared. In their place, over the past generation or so, manufacturing industries have grown in low-cost labor centers such as Thailand, India, China and Vietnam. But as costs rise in those countries, too, where will manufacturers move their operations? Could Cambodia, Laos and Mongolia be next?

Meanwhile, African countries, for so long regarded as simply a source of rough diamonds, have been able, in less than a decade, to leverage their resource base to force foreign diamond manufacturers to establish plants in their countries in order to guarantee supplies of rough goods. Most recently, Botswana was able to twist the arm of mining giant De Beers, insisting that the firm moves its sorting and aggregation activities to Gaborone from London, where it has been based for generations. Is this a tipping point? Has the polarity of the diamond business shifted from north to south?

From its own more narrow perspective, De Beers does appear to have passed a tipping point. Where the company accounted, just 20 years ago, for more than 80 percent of global rough output, that figure has fallen, according to the company, to about 38 percent. Unable to afford the large-scale investments needed to lengthen the lifespan of its smaller mines, it sold them off to junior miners. The first and most famous diamond miner has been overtaken in volume terms by Russia’s Alrosa. A diamond may be forever, but staying top of the pack is only ever a temporary phenomenon.

Perhaps the most intriguing tipping point in the diamond jewelry industry currently, one that began just three years ago with the onset of the global financial crisis, is the way the United States is losing its position as the world’s largest market. The U.S. market has been the most important since at least the end of the Second World War, and is still the largest. Accounting for at least 50 percent of all jewelry sold, the industry, along with other retail sectors, benefited from the American consumer’s predisposition to spend.

But the United States has been hit by a double blow as its economy suffered the deepest financial crisis for 80 years and China’s economy has burst forward over the past decade to build up a huge reservoir of wealth while also developing a growing love of diamond jewelry. Have we seen the end of Pax-Americana and passed on to the Chinese century? The economy of the eastern giant, it is estimated, will surpass that of the United States in two decades or less.

It has long been fashionable to quote former U.S. President Benjamin Franklin as saying that nothing is certain in life except for death and taxes. Perhaps the time has come to add the word “change” to that cliché.

What is perhaps even more interesting, and certainly impressive, is the need for members of the diamond business to be multi-lingual. Of course, the international language of the trade – as it is for just about every other business too – is English. That’s a given. But travel around the diamond bourses and you will hear and see people with a command of at least two languages, often three, and sometimes four or more.

Perhaps the most impressive examples of people with an apparently effortless command of languages are to be found in Antwerp. Interview a diamond dealer and he will comfortably speak to you in English while taking calls in French and Flemish and, if he is Jewish, in Hebrew, too. However, it is not just in the diamond trade that this command of languages is apparent.

Go to a restaurant, a hotel, a museum or even just a sandwich bar in the vicinity of the diamond bourse, and make a request or place an order and you will be answered and served as if the person behind the counter had grown up in Britain, Holland and France simultaneously.

And the same largely applies to Israel as it does to Belgium, while in Mumbai and Hong Kong there is a similar level of multi-lingual ability.

As far as Israel and Belgium are concerned, the depth of language skills should not come as a surprise. Both are small countries with little or nothing in the way of natural resources. As a result, both are highly export dependent and have had to ensure their peoples have strong language ability. In Belgium’s case, the country has long been at the crossroads of wars and the building up of empires, as well as their falls.

Israel, too, located in a largely hostile region, has had to look westward to export markets in Europe and the United States. Although the country’s love affair with all things American ensures English is very widely understood and spoken, it also has substantial numbers of people fluent in Russian, French, Spanish and other European and African languages. Attracting immigrants from all over the world on a continuous basis has also enabled it to create global business links.

So, the next time you are in the area of the diamond exchange in Antwerp, Ramat Gan or Mumbai, don’t be surprised when you hear people effortlessly switching between languages as they order a sandwich, say hello to an overseas colleague, and answer a call from their office on their mobile phone all at the same time. It could be English, French, Flemish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Hindi, Gujarati, Mandarin, or simply Diamondese.

Word choice is trend driven and sometimes even seasonal. Much of the work that we do concerns the diamond and jewelry industries. During the roller-coaster ride that those industries have been on in the past three years, we have discovered situations where vocabulary we used just two years ago needs to be put aside, while different words are used to describe the current situation.

That is particularly apparent when writing articles on the financial performance of diamond and jewelry companies, the import and export success – or lack thereof – of the diamond centers, and the prices of rough diamonds. And it would be reasonable to assume that it applies just as equally to every other industry.

As the situation worsened following the onset of the global financial crisis in the last quarter of 2008, and then again when the situation started to turn around in late 2009, writers faced a distinct problem – finding enough synonyms to describe what was happening.

For example, in late 2008 and through to late 2009, the diamond trade saw demand for diamonds decline, fall, plunge, and even fall off a cliff. And then, as the situation started to recover, journalists looked for ways of telling readers that there was a moderation in the state of the market. And so, we had a flattening out of declines, there was a plateau, or prices were largely unchanged. And then, when the prices of rough diamonds turned around, we said that prices were edging up and inching up, they were increasing, they were rising, and then they started to surge, soar and skyrocket.

The right-click has been a very useful tool in this endeavor. Pity the poor journalist of yester-year, who required a sufficiently deep word pool, or at the very least a thesaurus at hand, in order not to bore the poor reader with repetition. Note that I used the word “poor” twice in the previous sentence because, well, there wasn’t really a decent synonym for it. How easy it is today to right-click on a word and instantly have a choice of several alternatives from which to choose.

Does that mean that the role of the humble wordsmith is coming to an end? Can software mimic the work of the dedicated scribe? Applications have been on the market for around two decades that aim to give publishers the ability to simply pour information into a type of mould, with the result being a cleanly written and polished article providing all the relevant information.

Fortunately, these applications have not taken off, though recent reports from the United States suggest that they may still have a future, as a result of new developments. Can the average reader tell the difference between an article written by a human and a machine? And will readers care, as long as they receive accurately written news quickly? Or, more worryingly, provided at a lower cost?

These are not easy times for we modest journalists who, in many cases, have spent decades polishing and refining our art. Although it is true that having our work done by machines running extraordinarily complex algorithms is rather more complimentary than the proverbial chimpanzee bashing away at a typewriter, it nevertheless gives us cause for concern.

As a journalist with a quarter of a century of experience in the trade, I have read and written about machines and software that would render as irrelevant an entire class of labor. A full 20 years ago, in Britain, alarm was widespread following the creation of a program that could design news pages thus, putatively, doing away with the need for benches of sub-editors. Fortunately, the computer had a different set of priorities, and was unable to tell a human interest story from a dry stock market report.

There is one saving grace, however. As far as I am aware, applications that aim to do away with us unassuming wordsmiths are unable to produce acerbic blogs. So there may yet be hope for us after all.

But, if it is prepared properly, it is possible to improve the odds of having the press release picked. As a long-time press release jockey, the following are eight things I suggest you keep in mind.

1. Where’s the news?
The fact that you are putting out a press release does not automatically qualify it for distribution. In other words, editors do not award Brownie points for effort; they’re looking for news value. If they cannot find it – and that means finding it without devoting an undue amount of time in doing so – your press release will land in the trash.
To help point them in the right direction, place the newsworthy item in both the lead paragraph and the headline. This will help convince an editor that your press release has value. If the newsworthy item is sunk into paragraph three or even paragraph two, there is a good chance that the editor will not read that far.

2. Trim the fat!
Remember the dictum “less is more”? Well, keep it in mind. Get to the point, stay on topic, and say what needs to be said.
This does not mean that, if you are writing about a new product, you should not provide any information about your company. You may, but maintain a proper balance between your primary news item and the secondary subjects. In other words, the information about the company most likely should be brief, and it also should be held in the second half of the press release.

3. This is a sprint and not a marathon.
A prefect press release keeps to one page, or about 500 words. That’s a rule of thumb, of course, and on occasion topics provide you with no choice but to push into a second page. But that should be the exception and not the rule.

4. Keep it simple.
Inexperienced writers tend to become entangled in their own words, confusing both themselves and their readers with complex sentence structures.
Allow me to quote the bible of professional writers, namely “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White: “Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tells.”

5. Make your quotes sound human.
If you plan on quoting someone in your press release, and it’s wise to do so, make it sound like someone could have said that. Editors prefer to print copy that looks like it was not copied from a press release.
A quote that appears to have been produced by robot is a dead giveaway. I suggest reading it aloud. If it sounds natural, then you can use it.

6. Do not be too advertorial.
Clearly you have an agenda in putting out a press release, and the editor will understand that. But the difference between a press release and an advertisement is that the press release or part thereof is either presented by the publication or news website as its own article, or it is rewritten to form part of another article. If it is too self serving – using expressions like “the largest,” “the best” or “the most popular,” and they are not backed up with verifiable facts, the editor will become uncomfortable.

7. Read your copy when you are done, several times over.
Check your press release carefully before sending it out, and ideally get one or two other people to do the same. For the most part writers are not good proofreaders of their own copy, because there is a tendency to read over mistakes that you have already made once.
And don’t assume that the editor will catch the mistake. Often, in this cut and paste world of journalism, your mistake will reappear on each of the news websites and publications that select to use your press release.
Also, factual errors are generally worse than typos, and they are less likely to be picked up by editors. So remember, when you click the send button, it’s on the record, for good or for bad.

8. It’s the distribution stupid!
Without getting too Zen about it, “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Simply stated, you can construct the perfect release in all respects, but if it does not get to those individuals who you need to publish it, you will have wasted your time. In particular, do not rely on the free Internet sites that will upload any press release sent their way. The fact that it is out there on the Internet does not guarantee that it will reach your target audience.
Successful press releases, particularly in niche industries, use the golden bullet approach, making their way into email boxes of the media representatives who are able get your message out there.
There is no way around it; you need a good distribution database.

Although several people, including, famously, former American vice president Al Gore, have claimed to have invented the Internet, who invented the word itself? Or, come to that, World Wide Web? And who decided that it made more sense to say: “Boot up your computer” instead of just switch it on?

Perhaps the most ubiquitous form of words related to computing is that where ‘e-’ has become the prefix – email, e-retailing, e-business, e-travel and many others.

And then there are words such as “firewall” that existed before the advent of modern mass computing for a wall that would, as the word indicates, prevent a fire from spreading from room to room in a building. Suddenly, about a decade ago, it became impossible to prevent the spread of the word, and it has now become a basic element of modern computers. Similarly, Gateway existed before the Internet and has been adopted with simple effect.

Then, there are words and expressions such as “operating system,” that appear to be quite clear, but someone, somewhere, had to come up with them. Similarly, “backup,” “background,” “desktop,” and “memory” make sense, but how did they become an everyday part of the lexicon of computing? And “pop-up” quickly enables us to understand its meaning, but why not “Irritating window offering something nobody is interested in”?

There are terms that have been invented to explain jobs and tasks that have been done manually for centuries. “Data mining” means looking for information that is not necessarily close to hand, possibly because you forgot where you stored it, while “data warehousing” is an elegant term for the cardboard box in which we used to throw documents when no longer needed.

Those expressions, and many others, and the ease and ubiquity, with which they are used, point to the reason they may have been invented – they make us feel good and important. None of us, fortunately, has had to work in a coal mine, but if you have spent the last 45 minutes data mining, you are usually exhausted.

And what about acronyms such as LAN and WAN? Perhaps most irritating, is that trying to create alternatives for these expressions is extremely hard to do, and they sound uncomfortable and clumsy. Try LAN, for example, Local Area Network. Would anybody vote for changing it to RVS – Restricted Vicinity Set-up. It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue.

Of course, many words make perfect sense, such as “applications,” while others, such as “virus” and “bug” immediately make us aware of the inherent danger. On the other hand, dealing with “network layers,” “packet filters” and “protocol stacks” must surely be as boring as they sound.

Have you got enough RAM, and do you remember ASCII and ROM? Need some more gigabytes or are you already onto terabytes? Megabytes? Don’t make me laugh. Has your CPU “crashed” lately or do you carry out timely “backups”? Well, anyway, you get the idea.

Meanwhile, there are other, sexier words, such as eCommerce. Who could resist taking part in some eCommerce? Indeed, the figures speak for themselves. In the past decade, consumer purchases from Internet retailers have shot up thousands of percent and now total tens of billions of dollars annually. I rest my case.

A retailer with both a physical presence and an “e-Store” is known as a “Brick and Click” enterprise. Pity the poor traditional retailer who is no more than “Brick and Mortar.” His time must surely be past. He also obviously uses “snail mail.” Remember that? Envelopes, stamps, mail boxes, mailmen? You do? You’re obviously over the age of 30.

On that theme, almost everyone has heard of Business-to-Business, and Business-to-Consumer, or B2B and B2C, respectively. However, that format has spread, much like a virus, to include Government-to-Business, Government-to-Citizen and, of course, Government-to-Government – which, presumably, is how government officials communicate with each other.

Needless to say, the words and expressions just mentioned are but a tiny sample of the vast number that have been invented and continue to be invented while many others have already long been discarded – cruelly thrown into the deleted items of computing history once their purpose and relevance has become obsolete.

Will ‘blogs’ continue to exist? As long as modern men and women wish to continue to communicate with each other, then they will. But we may be calling them something else.

And so, in the spirit of blogging and the general theme of this article, here’s a word I made up by chance during a meeting where a discussion was taking place about the Web and ethical behavior – Webequette. Is that how words get created? Someone short-circuits two real words into one? I don’t know if it will catch on, although it really should since it so eloquently and clearly summarises an increasingly important subject.

And it certainly couldn’t sound worse than ‘Reduced Instruction Set Computing’.

For the first time, the Israel Diamond Institute (IDI) supported a diamond pavilion which housed a dozen or so local diamond firms. Briza Color Diamonds is one of Israel’s outstanding firms that produces and markets color treated, natural diamonds and HPHT treated colored diamonds.

Located strategically at the entrance of the fair, its booth and displays were gaining lots of attention from the visiting public. It is important to note that Briza, together with a handful of other—mostly Israeli—diamond companies, is responsible not only for creating significant market shares for these treated stones, but also for transferring these products from the market’s periphery into the center of consensus of the international jewelry market.

Briza was one of the Israeli diamond and gemstone firms who had set up booths at the fair. Most of the diamantaires queried said that while they had no high expectations of the fair as to sales, they were consciously there to create visibility and solidify relationships with their local clientele.

Moti Turgeman, whose company specializes in fantasy diamond cuts, said Israeli jewelers rarely buy large center stones, let alone in quantities, as is the case in the American and Asian markets. “Still, a lot of Israeli jewelers who produce high-end, often hand-made jewelry take an interest in what we and our colleagues have to offer. There is a lot of potential in the Israeli jewelry export market, and demand for larger center stones will ultimately rise,” he said.

A sales representative of Deivid Itshak Diamonds said the company management had decided to give Jovella a try and exhibit a choice of smaller diamonds and colored gemstones.

Several Indian companies, which have offices in Israel, made a first appearance at Jovella, displaying exactly those goods—a wide choice of small diamonds, up to 0.10 carats in a variety of shapes—which most Israeli jewelers set in their 14 and 18 karat gold jewelry designs.

Diamond firms that also produce jewelry lines were also present at Jovella. The veteran firm Tobias Diamonds & Jewelry displayed an impressive number of lines of diamonds set in yellow and white gold. A sales representative of Aritan, a diamond and jewelry wholesale firm operated by Eytan Wachstock, with offices in the diamond exchange complex firm, said they would not have missed the fair. “Savy Israeli retail jewelers can buy well in Israel, at qualities and for prices that are internationally very competitive!”

A new player at Jovella was Iris Ben Gad who, with her small booth, generated rather some excitement. Called “Wild Diamonds,” Gad, together with her business partner Kami Yitzhakov, sells rough diamonds, the overwhelming majority of which would be labeled as industrial by even the most experienced diamantaires. “That is in fact a misnomer,” Gad noted. “They are rough diamonds that can be manufactured successfully and used in jewelry. While these diamonds are mostly opaque or at most semi translucent, we select and choose only rough diamonds that are even in color, and can be manufactured and cut into the shapes we need.” The ‘face’ of an oval shaped rough diamond set in a ring is not left untouched, but also not polished smooth. “It looks like a stylized rough diamond,” a visiting jeweler marveled, handling a ring with a half carat, yellow, roughly buffed round rough diamond set as a center stone.

Compared to gem quality diamonds, the prices are extremely affordable and range between $50 and $250 per carat. “It’s a wonderful new niche to be in,” said Ben Gad’s business partner Yitzhakov, a veteran importer and trader in colored gemstones who operates a store on Tel Aviv’s Allenby Street.

Colored gemstones were exhibited by a number of firms, some of them veteran exhibitors. Colgem Ltd. exhibited a choice of African and Brazilian colored gemstones, among them aquamarine, fancy colored sapphire, emerald and mandarin garnet. The company founder, Israel Eliezri, displayed a collection of natural colored diamonds, one of the company’s specialties.

A newcomer to the show was RDA Business Technologies, a company which, in spite of its name, exhibited an impressive collection of fancy colored sapphire. Company director Teddie Shlaen said each and every stone hailed from Madagascar and was unheated. “Most of the stones mined in Madagascar reach the market after they are heated. We take pride in offering only completely natural stones.”

This year, the abundance of Israeli companies selling fashion jewelry was eye catching. The Danon Company, dubbed the Israeli Pandora by one of the visitors, displayed a huge inventory of fashion jewelry pieces, with an emphasis on bangles and necklaces, the majority strings with of silver coated metal (pewter) pieces and an enormous variety of glass, as well as natural and synthetic gemstone beads.

Yitzchak Bendor, general manager of the Israel Jewelry Manufacturing Association (IJMA) said the organizers had registered some 200 foreign visitors, predominantly from Russia, Ukraine, as well as from various western European countries and some from the USA. “Most exhibitors are pleased with the attendance and the orders they are writing,” Bendor said, speaking at the end of the first day, saying that producers of fashion jewelry were doing particularly well.

Bendor’s impression was confirmed by Arik Turkenich of TR Designs. “In times of economic downturn, fashion jewelry is least likely to suffer; on the contrary, it will be doing much better.” Turkenich said that, as a chief supplier of the local Magnolia fashion jewelry chain that operates jewelry kiosks in dozens of shopping malls in Israel, this had been evident in sales in the past years.

The Dabbah Judaica company of Jerusalem stood out by its new lines of aluminum and silver jewelry designs, aptly named “silver & colors.” “While our production is mostly that of Judaica, we found that the combination of colored anodized aluminum and sterling silver is very appealing to the public and we’ve since developed our jewelry lines,” said Rachel Dabbah, chief designer and partner in the family owned firm.

Ari Kuperman, a one-man operation jeweler form the north of Israel, said that at the show he consciously displayed his silver jewelry. “This market is wide open for these types of goods. I do have several 14 and 18 karat gold jewelry lines, including rings set with diamonds, but you have to go with the flow of the market and show what sells.”

And if someone wanted proof of the ability of young Israeli jewelers to develop their own, particular style and stand firmly on their own feet, this was offered by Shirli Matatia, with a choice of lines in gold-plated and silver jewelry. Matatia, a class of 2004 graduate from the Shenkar Academy, struck out on her own a few years ago, but not before she worked for renowned Israeli jeweler Boaz Ramot, where she amassed valuable experience in modeling, bench work, quality control and overseeing production.

Her training and experienced are certainly paying off as the quality of her work is obvious. Matatia’s lines of classical silver ring and pendant designs are beautifully crafted with captivating, but soft lines. Her designs in silver are mostly embellished by delicately set center stones; synthetics and simulants prevail but she also uses natural colored gemstones. While marketing is still a steep hill to climb, this artist has the potential to go far.