I LOVE TV shopping. I love watching 40-inch hands turning diamonds as big as tennis balls on my wide-screen televisions.

I love turning up on QVC's live shows, to promote a novel or a MindPower product, and watching the computers tracking thousands of calls from shoppers.

I love those 30-minute infomercials, giving me the hard sell for products I never imagined could exist - hair restorers that could make a beard sprout on a baby, personal security pendants that blast stinging clouds of pepper at assailants while screaming out a 118dB siren, car waxes so impenetrable that a troop of baboons could fail to put a scratch on your shining bodywork.

I tested the infommercial market a couple of years ago, tempted by the concept of staging an Oprah-style event to showcase a product. The statistics are daunting - for every half-hour ad you see on a mid-morning satellite channel, dozens have been filmed and tested on focus groups. Millions of pounds are spent creating a commercial with the glossiest production values, an ad so opulent that viewers can't help but believe.

Except they don't. We are armchair cynics, all of us, unwilling to accept anything we see, oblivious to the most expertly scripted patter of the most radioactively sincere host. Almost all infommercials achieve zero credibility, and are consigned to the rejects bin before ever being screened on international TV.

Even with dedicated shopping channels and hundreds of network controllers desperate for advertising Income, TV is too small to be the perfect sales medium. Time is limited. Prime time on top channels is very limited. So it's expensive - expensive to make the ads, expensive to test-run them, expensive to show them.

But now there's another way to advertise on a TV screen - every screen, in theory, on the planet. The worldwide web can be viewed via television: soon every TV will feature internet access as standard, the one indispensable channel.

For anyone with a computer and a modem, setting up a website costs nothing. The potential market is mind-boggling, with 300 million users expected online by 2001.

The biggest sellers, the ones every new web-surfer inspects during their first week online, have become instant multinationals - the bookseller Amazon.com is judged on the stock markets to be worth more than Sainsbury's. The smallest sellers are worth nothing at all - and if you set up a website today to sell produce from your allotment or your unwanted CDs, then you'll join the small guys. Low-traffic websites are much more microscopic than minnows they're electronic plankton.

How do you get to be a big fish? Not by eating the other little ones, but by merging with them. The internet is a mass of world-wide communities, and smart communities thrive online.

One of the smartest is ARTcnet.com, a virtual gallery of Jewish artists. The sales set-up is smooth, the images are expertly displayed and the work is of a breathtakingly high standard.

These are not world-famous artists, but they are brilliant and successful people whose pieces are desirable, and collectible. It's a long way from the high-budget, lowest- common- denominator mindset that drives infommercials - many of the ARTcnet.com paintings are offered at $5,000 or more.

The project was pioneered by ARTcnet president Phyllis Zombie, based in Gladwyne, Philadelphia. Next year she will be taking groups of US collectors to Israel to meet some of the artists who sell through the site - Jan Menses, for instance, and Yoram Ra'anan, Frank Meisler, Nili Kook, Dorit Levinstein, Yitshak Greenfield, Yaacov Xaszemacher, Elyah Succot, Boruch Nachson, Lana Rubinstein and Yitszhak ben Yehuda.

Ra'anan's glorious paintings are easily spotted on the web pages. He works in dazzling, light colours with an inner fire, transforming every scene into a blazing sunset. Greenfield's collages, Kook's sculptures, Kaszemacher's silkscreens and ben Yehuda's lithographs are all as fascinating.

The gallery is divided into virtual rooms, one for religious paintings, another for sculptures and so on. You can work at viewing the pieces, visiting each artist's online studio, reading the notes or you can simply leave the main page running, where a simple programme endlessly shuffles through some of the most popular images.

Or, of course, you can take out your credit card and buy one.

Last month I was raving about MP3, the digital format which makes every kind of music, by even the most obscure of musicians, globally available, with CD quality and no pricetag. MP3 guarantees that Jewish music will reclaim its audience.

Online salesrooms, like ARTcnet, are doing the same for Israeli artists. Yoram Ra'anan doesn't need an infommercial to sell his paintings. There are already I50 million people worldwide with instant access to his images.