Some marketing people prefer terms other than viral marketing. In his popular e-mail newsletter about selling on the Web, John Audette asked readers to suggest alternatives, including other terms in current use. Among those suggested have been:

avalanche marketing
buzz marketing
cascading style marketing
centrifugal marketing
exponential marketing
fission marketing
grass roots marketing
organic marketing
propogation marketing
referral marketing (borrowing a term long used in marketing prior to the Web)
ripple marketing
self-perpetuation marketing
self-propogation marketing
wildfire marketing

The Moto Development Group has tested the touchscreen accuracy of four leading smartphones, three running on the Google Android platform (Nexus One, Motorola Droid, HTC Droid Eris) and the Apple iPhone 3GS. The tests show that the iPhone comes out on top.

The Moto group, which is unrelated to Motorola, claims it has experience developing products that use capacitive touch technology, like the one used on the iPhone, on the Nexus One and on the Motorola Droid smartphones.

‘All Touchscreens are Not Created Equal’

In order to compare the phones, Moto developed a simple test, which implied drawing lines across the screens of all four phones using a drawing application. The tests measured the screens’ accuracy depending on various factors, such as applying pressure on the screen with the full pad of the finger or just the dry corner.

(Click above image to enlarge) The tests used light and medium finger pressure to determine the touchscreens’ accuracy. Credit: Moto Labs

Under these circumstances, the iPhone came out first for touchscreen accuracy in Moto’s tests, with all three Android devices lagging behind. “On inferior touchscreens, it’s basically impossible to draw straight lines,” the report noted.

Despite larger, higher resolution screens on both the Google Nexus One and the Motorola Droid, the lines drawn on the iPhone’s smaller, lower-resolution screen were more accurate in these tests.

Moto’s tests also highlight the phones’ screen performance at the edges, where it notes that the iPhone has a sensitivity problem. The Droid Eris was named the winner in this category by the tests.

The group puts the difference in touchscreen accuracy between the four phones on the quality of the touchscreen sensor, which has to have the highest signal-to-noise ratio.

“When a manufacturer gets it right, the device tracks touch inputs almost as if they were connected to physical objects in the real world,” the report claims. “Get it wrong and consumers end up with inferior touchscreen systems that are inaccurate, insensitive, and absolutely infuriating to use for typing.”

Your photos are the centerpiece of your digital scrapbooking pages, giving your friends and family a sense of what you felt that day. The vibrant colors, the light on the faces, or the majesty of the landscape all tell aspects of the story you capture on the page.

Use an artist’s eye to choose your photos. Think about the way you usually look through your photos. If you’re a parent, you may look through photos of your kids with a sense of love and maybe laughter–enjoying the smiles, remembering specific moments. But when you’re choosing the images for your scrapbooking page, concentrate on using your artist’s eye. This means looking for photos that show the central image clearly and have a vibrant crispness. You choose a photo that includes the kids, but also offers an interesting angle, a pleasing light, or another distinguishing feature that brings color, visual interest, or lightness and humor to the mix.

Go for consistency–and variety. There’s no hard and fast rule about how many photos you should include on your scrapbooking page, but for best results–unless you want to include a number of thumbnail-sized images–one large photo and two or three smaller photos will be plenty. When selecting photos, remember that both consistency and variety are important. You want the photos to all have a unifying theme–perhaps they were all taken on the same day and part of a series, or they all relate to a specific theme or event that is central to your narrative. Variety helps people understand why you are using multiple pictures. The big moment might be captured in a large photo of your son receiving a baseball trophy, but the other photos on the page might also show an image of him at bat in a recent game and a picture of him horsing around with the team afterwards.

Use the power of the crop. Cropping is a digital scrapbooker’s best friend because it enables you to focus others’ attention on the aspect of the image you most want them to see. Cropping lets you remove irrelevant elements. The process of cropping an image is a simple technique in most image editing software. In Photoshop CS4 ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), you begin by selecting the Crop tool, dragging the portion of the image you want to keep (the rest of the display is masked with a dark screen so you can see this clearly); then click the Commit button in the Options bar (the green check mark) to complete the crop. You can also create a Crop Preset to apply the same crop values to other images you add to the page.

Get the red out. Red-eye is a perennial problem is many peoples’ photos. Red-eye occurs when the camera flash reflects off the retina of the eye. Most photo editing software includes a feature to help you eliminate red eye; in Photoshop CS4 display the tool group behind the Spot Healing Brush tool and click Red Eye tool. Click in the red eye to remove it.

Adjust images your way. Photoshop CS4 includes a set of adjustments you can use to tailor–to a remarkable degree–the different characteristics of the images on your page. You can also make all kinds of changes to page elements using options in the Layer Style dialog in Photoshop CS4. Experiment with these and other image options to see what best suits your page. A few adjustments can make a big change in the way your image looks.

Frame your work. You can easily add a frame to your images. In Photoshop CS4, you’ll find the command you need in the Actions panel. (If necessary, display the panel by clicking Window and choosing Actions, and click the side arrow to choose the default selection of frames.) Click the frame you want to apply and click the Play Selection button (with the arrow) to add the frame to the image. You can then add the framed image as a new layer on your scrapbook page and arrange and enhance it (by adding a shadow, lighting, and more) as you’d like.

These are just a few of the techniques you can use to make your scrapbook photos shine. While we use Photoshop CS4 for this example, and the instructions are specific to this version, note that you can achieve similar image editing results with Adobe Photoshop Elements ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), iPhoto ’09 ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), and the previous version of Photoshop. Alternative image editing programs such as Acorn ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) and Pixelmator ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) also give you cropping and red eye removal capabilities. Using the variety of tools and options in your favorite photo editing software, you can easily enhance your images so that they inspire others and help them feel like a part of your story.

[Katherine Murray is a technology writer in Indianapolis and the author of Creative Digital Scrapbooking (Peachpit Press).]

1. Backtype. The Backtype service lets you find, follow and share comments from across the Web. It indexes comments from millions of blogs and social networks, making them available for search based on a keyword or a URL (especially handy for tracking posts on Twitter). It also lets you “claim your comments”-by inputting your usernames for several websites such as Digg, FriendFeed or Facebook, Backtype then attributes those comments to you on your Backtype profile.

2. Evernote. Evernote, a cloud-based service similar to mindmapping allows you to save notes from meetings, photos, documents and more, then organizes them in a searchable way (or you can do that yourself). Evernote recognizes text in pictures too; you can archive notes from a meeting or keep travel documents handy by snapping a photo of them. It also supports Ritescript-a division of Evernote-which is a handwriting recognition software. (Evernote also closed out 2009 with $10 million in financing.)

3. Kosmix. Enter a keyword into search engine Kosmix and it gathers content from across the Web, displaying information in modules such as a general overview of the keyword, news and blogs, company profiles, images, video, latest tweets, related content, reviews and guides, forums, shopping guides and more. Quite comprehensive.

4. Posterous.Posterous is a publishing platform that lets you post pictures, audio files, links, documents and video-but what differentiates it from other blogging services is that it can be maintained entirely via e-mail, on the go. It also lets you post updates to other sites you belong to, such as Facebook, Twitter and WordPress, so you don’t have to visit those sites individually.

5. Shout’em.Shout’em lets you customize a secure microblogging network where you can share photos, files, links and locations with only the people you want-great for businesses looking for a secure alternative to Twitter. Or, if you prefer, you can synch your account with Twitter and Facebook. Shout’em has also rolled out a mobile client for BlackBerry and iPhone users.

Which Web 2.0 companies are on your horizon this year?

news – http://www.pcworld.com/article/186203/5_web_20_startups_to_watch_in_2010.html