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Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest.

Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we're just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet's first boom cycle.

At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.

Feeling a bit under the weather? Soon you'll be able to cough into your mobile phone for an instant diagnosis. A research firm called STAR Analytical Services is working to develop software that can analyze the sound of a cough and identify it as either associated with a common cold, the flu, or something worse - like pneumonia or another serious respiratory disease. Just as doctors have been doing for years, the software will "listen" to the wetness or dryness of a cough and determine whether all you need is a lozenge or if you need to come in for a doctor's visit instead.

In our society, there's an image of a computer nerd as this sad, pale, and lonely guy sitting in the dark gazing at a glowing screen. As it turns out, that's just an image and it's far from the truth. The reality is that most technology users are perfectly well-adjusted and social creatures. In fact, those who surf the web and use their mobile phones may actually be more social and better connected to the world at large than those who don't.

Are iPhone users really that bad? We're not buying it. It's odd that a consumer electronics shopping site would sponsor a study that paints such a lousy picture of iPhone owners, but that's exactly what Retrevo.com has done. For whatever reason, the results of their recent report on smartphone owners in the U.S. has returned some unflattering figures about those who own Apple's ubiquitous handheld, the iPhone, as compared to the more business-minded folks who choose a Blackberry instead.

Buying a single article from a scientific journal is usually prohibitively expensive if you are not a student or teacher at a school that subscribes to the journal. Most academic journals are available only behind these paywalls, but Deep Dyve just announced a new product that could radically change the marketplace for scientific, technical and medical articles. Until now, Deep Dyve only indexed articles and directed users to the journal's own site. Starting today, users can rent articles from Deep Dyve. Accounts start with a pay-as-you-go account, by which users are charged $0.99 to keep an article for one day, and go up to an unlimited account for $19.99 per month.

Twitter use and status updates in general are on the rise among Internet users overall and several specific user groups as compared to 2008 and earlier this year, according to research just released from the Pew Internet Project.

In December 2008 and April 2009, the organization's studies showed that around 11 percent of Internet users were using a microblogging or status updating service. That number has now risen to 19 percent, one out of every five Internet users. The three major growth areas driving this increase are social network users, mobile web users and users younger than 44 years old.

A recent study by industry group the Participatory Marketing Network has unearthed some surprising data on Gen Y behavior. Apparently, the members of this young demographic (ages 18-24) would rather give up their social networking accounts before they would abandon their email. Given that this generation is typically viewed as "plugged in" digital natives who don't have any use for email, the study raises many questions. Have the previous reports about Generation Y's disdain for email simply been wrong? Or has Gen Y grown up a bit now and has learned the necessity of the medium?

An independent study by Equation Research found that today's consumers are disappointed with the performance of the mobile web. Despite the proliferation of smartphones with their full-featured web browsers, the majority of mobile web surfers have encountered issues with accessing websites via their handsets over the past year. The number one issue reported involves websites that are too slow to load, frustrating users to the point that over half said they would never return to the site in question.

Five years ago, Internet traffic was, for the most part, managed by tier 1 providers like AT&T, Verizon, Level 3 Communications and Global Crossing, all of which connected to thousands of tier 2 networks and regional providers. Today, that has changed. Now, instead of traffic being distributed among tens of thousands of networks, only 150 networks control some 50% of all online traffic. Among these new Internet superpowers, it's no surprise to find Google listed. In fact, the search giant accounts for the largest source (6%) of all Internet traffic worldwide.

This data comes from a new report put out by Arbor Networks, who has just completed a two-year study of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, the largest study of global traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990's.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University recently revealed the results of a study which looked into how people were using Twitter to talk about products. Companies, of course, fear what a negative barrage of tweets can do to their brand, leading many to establish Twitter accounts themselves to provide information, customer service, and support. As it turns out, these businesses may not need to worry too much about what the "Twitter effect" can do to their image after all. The study revealed that the number of brand-related tweets where sentiment is expressed is not the dominating force that you may think. In fact, the majority of tweets mentioning a brand are merely casual comments or tweets from someone giving or seeking information. And when sentiment is expressed, it's generally positive.

European researchers have been working for years on a system that allows developers to create internet applications that can manage and fix themselves. Called SELFMAN, the project aims to address the challenges inherent in large scale applications. According to Peter Van Roy, project coordinator, "The central challenge when you build big internet applications is how to keep them running without having to tweak and manage them all the time. We wanted to make big internet applications easy, so that all the management problems you normally have are handled by the system itself. It will take the internet to the next level."

Indeed it will.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. The one time king of social networks, MySpace, now has the honor of being the site where the less affluent members of the online population stake their claims by way of bedazzled profiles overrun with auto-playing videos and songs. Meanwhile, the upscale, financially solvent users have moved on - and by moved on, we mean to Facebook, of course. At least those are the findings of the latest social networking study done by American consumer behavior analysis firm Nielsen Claritas.

Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative.

According to recent analysis by the Online Publishers Association (OPA), more people than ever are spending their time online visiting content sites which provide news, information, and entertainment. Despite the emergence of social networks, and in particular the rapid growth of Facebook, it's content sites which engage web surfers' attention the most these days - time spent on these sites is up 88% from only five years ago. That's not to say social networking community sites haven't grown too, it's just that their growth hasn't come at the expense of content. Instead, people are using traditional communication sites and services (think webmail, IM, and discussion groups) less and less and choosing to use Facebook and other social networks instead.

Is it easier to talk to your online buddies than your friends out there in the "real world?" Do you feel like you know more about what's happening in the lives of your Facebook and MySpace friends than with those who don't have accounts or don't bother to update them? According to a recent UK MySpace study of over 16,000 social network users, these sorts of feelings are common among today's younger generation. The study revealed that a good portion of this group admits to feeling more comfortable sharing and communicating with friends online than they do when logged out of cyberspace.

We love it when members of the ReadWriteWeb community share links with us to things we might like to write about. In order to make that easier to do, thus hopefully something you'll do more of, we're posting a bookmarklet you can drag up to your browser toolbar and click anytime you're on a page you want to share with the ReadWriteWeb staff.

Tip RWW <-- Just grab that link and give it a click any time you're on a page you want to share with us. An email window will open (just using a mailto: link) pre-populated with the link and page title, addressed to us. Hit send, maybe add a note if you like. Breaking news, good background information, critiques of the things we've written - whatever you like. We'll give you credit for anything we use in a post, unless you ask us not to. Consider yourself part of the RWW team.

Yoelle Maarek, the woman credited with the creation of Google Suggest and a variety of other innovative features, has left the company and will now lead Yahoo's research efforts in the tech hot-bed of Israel. It's an interesting move, to go from the clear market leader to a company widely criticized for its flaccid search and monetization.

When it comes to innovation, though, Yahoo is no slouch - and a new day may be dawning there with the arrival of new CEO Carol Bartz. Bartz seems to have a good sense of humor and as the creator of the often-wacky Google Suggest product, we assume Maarek does too. Where would you rather work, at Google or at Yahoo, if you had the choice?

Zotero, the popular open-source research, bookmarking, and bibliography tool, just released version 2.0 of its Firefox plugin, which, among other things, adds support for sharing libraries with groups. With this new version, users can now easily collaborate in groups and create group libraries. While these new functions are obviously available in Zotero's Firefox plugin, the most interesting changes have happened on Zotero's website, where groups can now create private and public sites to share their collections.

There's a lot of information about many of us spread around the web and though privacy is important to discuss - there's also another side of that coin. It can be very useful to tie together info from disparate sources about a particular individual. Today I saw a tool for finding those various profile pages that really impressed me.

About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.