Elance has grown pretty dramatically over the past few years, as more and more jobs move online and work becomes more virtual. To provide more value to its users, the company wants to do more than just connect employers and contractors. That’s why it has a virtual workroom that enables collaborative work and communications tools between them.

In their virtual workrooms, contractors can send messages, submit invoices, respond to to-do lists and other features. And now, Elance has added a new video chat feature to enable more “face-to-face” contact between collaborators, without users having to enter a whole different application to connect.

According to Elance VP of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Ved Sinha, the addition of video chat to the virtual workroom will reduce the friction that comes when employers and contractors work together. While many had previously interfaced through other applications, building the chat window directly into a contractor’s dashboard enables instant communication with the click of a button.

To do this, Elance uses Tokbox’s OpenTok video chat client, which enables businesses to embed video chat into their websites. While there are plenty of video chat offerings available on the market today, Sinha told me by phone that OpenTok was the only solution that allowed Elance to build video chat directly and seamlessly into the virtual workroom.

That was a big advantage for Elance, which wanted to ensure its users didn’t have to open a different client or application to get in touch with one another. And for its clients, the feature should enable better coordination and more productivity.

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At the start of each new year, jobs site CareerBuilder polls several thousand HR pros and hiring managers about their outlook for the year ahead when it comes to hiring contract and temporary workers. And just like the last three years, the survey this year found a steady uptick in the number of businesses planning on hiring contract staff, with 36 percent responding they will hire such workers in 2012. That’s up from:

• 34 percent for 2011
• 30 percent for 2010
• 28 percent for 2009

Certainly plenty of these temp positions may be traditional seasonal workers taken on to deal with the summer rush at a resort or as short-term fillers when an employee is out on maternity leave, for instance. But the steady rise in the number of contract employees firms plan to take on does support the argument that lean economic times are opening more and more business’s eyes to the advantages of agile hiring practices.

“Employers are relying on temporary and contract workers to support leaner staffs,” commented Eric Gilpin, president of CareerBuilder’s staffing and recruiting group in the release accompanying the survey. But he also noted that many firms plan to move contract workers to full-time roles if and when the economy picks up.

Do you foresee most employers reverting back to full-staff when the economy finally picks up?

Image courtesy of Flickr user troubalex.

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Cronin decided there must be a better way to match businesses in need of professional services with those able to help and ExpertBids was born. An online labor platform that aims to connect small- and medium-sized businesses looking for help with accountants, lawyers and consultants hoping to build independent practices, Chicago-based ExpertBids launched in November 2010.

A standard post on the site is free for companies (though a premium post which guarantees three bids within a week costs $50), while professionals pay small amounts to bid for work depending on the size of the project’s budget – larger projects have slightly higher fees. Quotes can be either a flat fee or hourly rate and the once the parties agree to a price, monitoring and billing for the work is entirely their responsibility. The site now has over 10,000 users, about 80 percent of which are US-based experts looking to sell their services and 20 percent are businesses hoping to hire.

Of course, ExpertBids is far from the only labor platform out there, with space leaders Elance and oDesk, reporting impressive growth. But Cronin feels his little site serves a need the big boys don’t by focusing specifically on professional services. “Some legal needs, you need to be able to go into the lawyer’s office and discuss with them, so we focus a little more on location than some of the other platforms,” Cronin says. But even in this relatively specialized niche, Cronin has company — oddly named Shpoonkle restricts itself to lawyers but aims to do basically the same thing.

Cronin acknowledges that there are hurdles for his fledgling business to overcome, including trust issues when clients are shopping for higher-end services. “For some people that’s their first hesitation with using the site,” Cronin concedes, but he notes, “the alternative is that you go through your phone book and you make a bunch of calls and you have less information.” ExpertBids also verifies the identity of the professionals who use it, checking bar numbers or CPA license numbers, as well as encouraging users to do their own research through relevant professional associations.

Perhaps a more troublesome objection is that sites like ExpertBids drive prices down for professionals. Cronin notes that pros on his site can’t see competing offers to discourage a race to the bottom. “We’re telling the experts to give whatever price makes sense for them, and if it’s not good for them then they shouldn’t be bidding that amount,” he says, though he also understands that, “if I was a professional, I would not like how cost conscious some of these companies are, but that’s a reality.”

Cronin sees the online labor platform model not as undermining professionals economically, but as empowering small operators to reach larger markets and give huge firms a run for their money.

Over the years, the legal industry and especially big firms just started to get so fat, inefficient and expensive, so there’s really an opportunity for solo and small firm lawyers to undercut these people without the high overhead of these humungous firms who have offices in all the downtown areas. If you can cut your overhead as a small firm, you’re going to be able to lower your prices significantly and still make a very decent profit.

Rather than view ExpertBids and the like as only a tool for businesses to drive down costs, Cronin paints a picture of platforms like his as arming professional David’s to take on complacent Goliaths. If he’s right, we should be seeing more of them popping up.

Do you think we’ll be seeing more niche online labor platforms as other industries embrace the model?

Image courtesy of ExpertBids.

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At the GigaOm Net:Work conference on Thursday, Fabio Rosati, President and CEO, of Elance and Trevor Blackwell, the Founder and CEO of Anybots discussed how this future is now. Elance is a consultant-based freelance organization and its resources use Anybots to virtually be on-site for customers. “Our workers commute two to three thousand miles to work in seconds,” Rosati said.

These “white collar” robots, controlled by a freelancer, can handle front lobby greetings, business deliveries and more. Because the human workforce doesn’t work 24 hours a day — and robots generally can — Anybots can be used by multiple people at different times, allowing for economies of scale. Blackwell mentioned this as the “Zipcar approach” as idle robots could be tapped into as needed.

But using robots to crowdsource work isn’t just about saving money or spreading out the workload: Even a virtual presence may be more important than a caller in a conference.

Panel moderator, Thomas Vander Wal, Principal and Sr. Consultant, InfoCloud Solutions and, Analyst, GigaOM Pro, recalled a recent encounter with an Anybot in the office. “I was on the phone,” he said, “and an Anybot was in the room, as were other people. I was so focused on the robot and people that I forgot we had someone on the phone.”

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Elance’s look back at the year reveals that online hiring has soared more than 100 percent from 2010, and the number of professionals working on the site is up more than 120 percent. Cumulative earnings this year should surpass $500 million.

And like his oDesk counterpart Gary Swart, Elance’s CEO Fabio Rosati (who is speaking at Net:Work Thursday) doesn’t feel the economic doldrums are the sole cause of the growing attraction of online labor platforms. What is? Structural change to work, Rosati told us in an interview:

The state of [the] economy and unemployment is acting as a catalyst. It’s forcing a large portion of the workforce to look for alternatives. It’s forcing business to remain more flexible. But what we’re seeing is a change in how work is done and it’s similar to commerce. What caused e-commerce? Did the rise of e-commerce result from problems in the economy? Not really.

E-commerce started to be more effective in some categories than regular commerce, and I think that’s exactly what’s happening in the world of work. Working online in many ways is more efficient, more effective and more immediate than traditional employment. Businesses that use the flexible work model have distinct advantages over businesses that don’t, and there are some departments within these companies that have always used a flexible work model anyway. Creative departments, marketing departments [and] IT departments have always approached talent in a very flexible way on a project basis. They’re just doing it online now. So I don’t think we’re going back. I think this is really structural.

And while some may feel this shift towards global, online labor platforms undermine American workers by opening them up to competition from lower wage workers abroad, Elance is predicting in its report that professional services will become “America’s next great export.”

“The global demand for US talent has increased steadily over the past year and is set to grow even faster as online platforms like Elance break down global barriers,” says the release that goes along with today’s numbers. But Rosati is a little more understanding of those who feel the rise of these platforms is a mixed blessing for American workers.

When you create a global workplace and a global workforce, the dynamics are very different. Suddenly, you have a lot more competition cross-border. I know that is a very strong reality, and at the same time, there’s the other side of it, which is that for the first time, a very capable, talented, U.S.-based professional can access work and have clients all over the world, and we’re seeing exactly that on the U.S. platform. I feel that it’s an important side of what’s happening, because Americans have amazing talents. We’re seeing companies that may be hiring in some parts of the world for certain types of tasks, but for others, they love the opportunity to hire people based in the U.S.

I don’t doubt there are strong pressures when you compete with someone who is living in another part of the world. For example, it doesn’t even have to be someone who is in a lower-wage country. It could be simply someone who has access to public health insurance. So if you’re working in the U.S., and you have to pay for your own health insurance, you may be at a disadvantage to someone living in Norway who absolutely doesn’t because it’s all covered by the government. So that dynamic is definitely real and a challenging aspect of what is happening, but there are also many positive things.

You have to hand it to Rosati for acknowledging that, for all the psychological and lifestyle benefits of independent work, it does offload tasks and expenses ( (like obtaining health insurance, dealing with tax issues and building retirement savings) entirely onto the worker. Also to Elance’s credit is their partnership with eHealth to help U.S. community members compare health coverage options. “I wish I had the magic wand to address the problem, but I don’t,” says Rosati.

But health insurance isn’t the only external cost shifted from employer to worker in the paradigm shift these platforms are pushing. Though Elance clearly tries to make verifying work, billing for it and sorting out logistics as simple as possible with everything from an internal file management system to built-in virtual meeting facility, one can’t help but feel independent workers are more burdened with what Craig Lambert recently dubbed “shadow work” in the New York Times.

Lambert defines the term as “all the unpaid labor — including, for example, housework — done in a wage-based economy,” and muses that all of us, not just independent contractors, are being saddled with more and more of it in the name of corporate profits:

Science fiction novels of a half-century ago dramatized conflicts between humans and robots, asking if people were controlling their technologies, or if the machines were actually in charge. A few decades later, with the digital revolution in juggernaut mode, the verdict is in. The robots have won. Although the automatons were supposedly going to free people by taking on life’s menial, repetitive tasks, frequently, technological innovation actually offloads such jobs onto human beings.

The conventional wisdom is that America has become a “service economy,” but actually, in many sectors, “service” is disappearing. There was a time when a gas station attendant would routinely fill your tank and even check your oil and clean your windshield and rear window without charge, then settle your bill. Today, all those jobs have been transferred to the customer.

From automated airport check-in terminals and the near extinction of travel agents to understaffed retail outlets where we find our size ourselves, more and more places are shifting work, with all its attendant costs in time and energy, from companies to individuals, argues Lambert. In its well-intentioned way, Elance and its competitors appear to be doing the same.

Do the larger markets for our services and increase in lifestyle flexibility make up for these extra costs?

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Plenty, argues a recent piece by Rieva Lesonsky on MSN’s Business on Main site, which argues that the tepid pace of small business hiring, while obviously impacted by the dreadful economic situation as a whole, is partially down to rise of freelancers and platforms, like oDesk and Elance that enable small firms to find them. She cites a study from the Kaufman Foundation from earlier this year as evidence:

The Kauffman Foundation suggests the job deficit is actually not recession-related. In fact, Kauffman’s study, “Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller: America’s Slow Leak in Job Creation,” shows that new employer businesses have declined 27 percent since 2006. However, when newly self-employed workers are added to the mix, the level of startups hasn’t declined, but instead has “held steady or even edged up since the recession.”

To put this in perspective, in the 1990s, new businesses opened their doors with about eight employees; today, that’s down to five. The culprit? The traditional business model doesn’t apply anymore, due to a number of factors, including technology and a globalized market.

Essentially we’ve created a contingent, freelance economy. There’s still money to be made, innovations to be marketed and ideas to be harvested. The difference is that many businesses today are choosing to hire on an as-needed basis, relying on a freelance workforce.

Numbers from office space provider Regus earlier this month tell a similar story. A survey of 12,000 companies worldwide by the firm found “47 percent say they plan to hire freelance staff and 44 percent plan to hire remote workers over the next two years.”

But this decline in small business hiring might not be entirely a bad thing, according to a recent piece by James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. In it, he notes that while small businesses are beloved by politicians, they are less productive than large firms and therefore do less to raise living standards. Countries with miserable recent growth like Greece and Portugal have some of the highest percentages of workers employed by small firms, he also points out.

Maybe the rise of the freelancer will make for a more dynamic economy even if it means less small business hiring. Does that sound plausible to you? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user billsoPHOTO.

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But is this the whole story? Writing on the American Express OPEN Forum blog recently, small business consultant Barry Moltz suggested these sorts of sites might have an often overlooked dark side for independent web workers: They drive down prices by broadening the supply of services. That’s good for companies shopping for remote workers, of course, but lousy for those hoping to keep their fees up. Moltz writes,

While these crowd-sourcing models have been around for a while, especially on the consumer side, they are not without complaints from people seeking this type of work.  This method tends you to drive down the price of services with less barriers to supply. Fabio [Rosati, CEO of Elance] compares it to shopping on Amazon.com, “You are no longer limited to the stores on main street. You can almost buy anything, anywhere.”

The idea that price competition is getting tougher out there for freelancers isn’t confined to Moltz’s post. Blog Freelance Folder also recently ran a post entitled “The Great Freelancing Pricing War.” “It’s a war out there–or at least it can feel like one when it comes to the prices freelancers charge for their services,” writes Laura Spencer before offering tips on how to fairly price your work and maximize your fee. She doesn’t expressly implicate the like of Elance in this increased price pressure, however.

What’s been your experience as an independent web worker – are sites like Elance and oDesk making it harder for you to charge a fair wage for your work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user rutlo.

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Source: Elance

It should be noted that because this study is the result of an online survey conducted on the Elance site itself, there will likely be considerable selection bias distorting the results towards freelancing, so it would be wise to take these  findings with a pinch of salt. I doubt that a more wide-ranging survey of recent college graduates, for example, would show such an overwhelming number of respondents in favor of freelancing over traditional employment.

While some people may argue that freelancing has only become more popular as jobs have become harder to come by following the economic downturn, the Elance study shows that many millennials actually choose freelancing over traditional employment. Only 27 percent indicated they would prefer to work as an employee, while 42 percent stated they prefer the freelance lifestyle. Web working is popular, too, with 54 percent saying they plan to telecommute at least some of the time — a lifestyle choice probably made easier by freelancing. It seems freelancing is making these millennials happier: 53 percent say they are happier when freelancing than when working as an employee. Encouragingly, despite a somewhat weak jobs market, particularly for younger people with less experience, 78 percent of respondents said they were either “Optimistic” or “Very optimistic” about their chosen career path.

Source: Elance

The study also looked at millennials’ job search habits. Unsurprisingly, many respondents reported they use online methods to find work. Online job ads (Monster.com and Craigslist, for example) were popular with 94 percent of respondents, but social media (Facebook, LinkedIn) was also used by 40 percent. The study also shows that 56 percent of respondents think that a digital resume (a LinkedIn profile, for instance) is the most effective tool for landing a job, compared to 44 percent who prefer a more traditional resume.

Despite the selection bias that’s probably skewing these results, it’s interesting to see such a positive attitude towards freelancing in younger people. Attitudes toward freelancing have shifted over the past few years, with many more people now prepared to consider it as a long-term career choice. It’s a shift that has certainly been helped by online freelance marketplaces such as Elance and Odesk, which have made it much easier for freelancers to find work worldwide. While some people may have initially tried freelancing out of necessity due to the economic downturn, many people now choose to freelance because it gives them the flexibility to pursue their lifestyle of choice. If more younger people really are actively looking to freelance rather than take up traditional employment now, it could point to an even bigger shift toward freelancing in the years to come.

Photo courtesy Flickr user {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}, charts courtesy Elance.

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The quarterly survey of job postings and online contractors revealed that more than a dozen cities that are still struggling with an unemployment rate higher than ten percent rank among the highest-earning locales on Elance. So while job seekers in Los Angeles may still be fighting 12 percent unemployment, web workers based there are among the highest paid on the platform.

What else did the Elance data reveal? Unsurprisingly, it’s still good to have tech skills, with the increased use of smartphones upping the demand for developers. Also less than shocking was an increased demand for tax preparers as April 15^th looms.

Less expected was the city given the crown of America’s geekiest metropolis. Move over Mountain View and San Jose, geek is now being spoken with a southern drawl as Austin, Texas took the title of top city for tech nerds. The home of SXSW now boasts the highest contractor earnings for IT skills on Elance’s platform. Amarillo continued its (also unlikely) reign as the top spot for creative talent, with the most contractor earnings in the “Creative” category.

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One interesting nugget of information from the oDesk report is that people from small towns (with populations of smaller than 15,000 people) are outperforming their big city counterparts like San Francisco and New York, both in terms of online work activity and number of hours worked per contractor. That’s probably because in smaller towns job opportunities are much more limited, and marketplaces like oDesk and Elance provide access to employers regardless of location.

Overall, it seems that the jobs market overall is recovering more slowly than economists expected it to following the recession, while these reports show that the freelance jobs market is growing quite substantially. With the economic recovery still looking fragile, it seems that some businesses are preferring to turn to temporary contract labor, rather than risking taking on permanent staff. But as the economic outlook improves, will we see a return to the situation where most people have regular paid employment, or has the downturn precipitated a permanent shift to freelance work for a portion of the working population, particularly in areas where traditional jobs might be harder to come by, such as in small towns and rural locations?

Of course, the Elance and oDesk figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. The data is from just two sites, and even though they are both fairly large marketplaces, they still only cover a tiny subset of the working population and cannot be considered to be representative of the freelance jobs market as a whole. The Freelancers Union, a nonprofit advocacy organization, is currently gathering data for its annual survey of freelancers; it will be interesting to see if its results also show a large increase in the amount of freelance work being carried out.

As guest author Ray Grainger noted last week, the landscape of the workforce is changing, with some estimates predicting that freelancers will make up 40 percent of the workforce by the end of the decade. A shift to freelance work for a significant portion of the population shouldn’t necessarily be feared — there are, after all, many benefits to being a freelancer, not least of which is much greater flexibility — but it would have implications for both policymakers and businesses to consider in areas such as access to healthcare, taxation and retirement planning.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Egan Snow.

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According to Fabio Rosati, president and CEO of Elance, who spoke alongside Lukas Biewald, CEO and founder of crowdsourcing labor site Crowdflower at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference, the human cloud provides the benefits of a workforce without the friction: no concerns about geography, instant access to the right talent, and the ability to hire-on demand and perform “labor arbitrage.” Over a thousand people are hired daily on Elance’s online marketplace and system for workers and work, with hundreds of thousands of jobs posted annually. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hours being billed through Elance alone, and Rosati predicts that this number is heading into the billions in short order.

With the human cloud at the ready, companies “don’t have to predict capacity,” said Biewald. Companies can “turn on and off people” like they’ve been able to turn computers on and off, hiring someone only when needed for what is needed, even if for just a few hours at a time.

One of the biggest changes working with the human cloud is trust. Rosati attributes the sophistication of technology as a contributor to what is perceived more and more as a secure method of work. Biewald’s company Crowdflower is seeing their customer base quickly expanding from smaller startups to much larger companies, with the most rapid changes occurring in just the last six months. Companies are trusting the human cloud.

Rosati is already seeing a hybrid model in enterprises combining both on-site teams when appropriate and tapping into the cloud when needed. Companies will be going through the steps of trying it out, learning from it, then seeing how far the model can be pushed. And more workers like the model, says Rosati whose company surveyed workers and found that 70 percent prefer working independently online over traditional full-time employment.

What does the future bring for the human cloud for the enterprise? Rosati predicts greater regulation in 2011 for cloudworking because as more and more larger companies adopt the virtual work model, they’ll demand it.

Technology is making the resume obsolete faster than we think. Now, some candidates send LinkedIn profiles in lieu of resumes. They’re better than resumes in that they give extra pieces of information: recommendations, which can be misleading but often give some insight into the candidate’s personality, as well as the people we know in common professionally. The website Unvarnished takes LinkedIn recommendations to another level by making the reviewer anonymous, and therefore more candid.

But sites like oDesk and eLance more closely reflect the future of resumes and how companies hire. When you hire someone on those sites (or similar contractor marketplaces), you don’t see things like what college they attended, you see past jobs and employer ratings. This simple reputation score is much more reliable, fair, and is harder to fudge than any resume.

Other sites pull reputation scores out of passive indicators. RailsRankings.com checks things like contributions to popular open-source projects to determine the best Rails programmers. At CrowdFlower, we assign work in the smallest possible increments, and we’ve learned that past performance on work is essential in predicting future performance.

As companies feel pressure to hire faster and hire more specialists on a part-time basis, it gets harder to even phone screen lots of candidates. At the same time, more people work on a part-time basis and have work experience with more companies. Reputation scores in online workplaces will start to replace resumes as the main initial hiring criteria. As such, the scores will need to become more nuanced. More faceted reputation scores might tell you that someone is good at back-end programming and bad at communicating, a great fit for certain programming jobs but not others.

The resume is just one part of a hiring process, and there’s lots of crucial effort and process that goes into assessing someone’s skill once you’ve contacted them. But there’s a high cost of time associated with every candidate you contact. Improving the initial part of the hiring pipeline — and giving the best people a chance to prove themselves — makes businesses hire better and run more efficiently. At the same time, the ethical and legal issues around who owns our reputation data will grow in importance as that data becomes crucial in shaping our careers.

Will the reputation scores from various sites start to merge over time? Will someone build a site where I can look at someone’s TopCoder rank and their reputation answering questions on stackoverflow.com? Will a site like LinkedIn, or a new upstart like Unvarnished, turn into a one-stop shop for evaluating a potential hire? It seems inevitable that online reputation will become the best first filter on a candidate, and that someone will turn that into quantifiable data, like an SAT score so that candidates can be filtered faster.

Lukas Biewald is the CEO of CrowdFlower which is organizing CrowdConf 2010, an event focused on the future of distributed work to be held in October.

The number of developer jobs in the Mobile category nearly doubled in the first quarter of 2010 from the same period the year before, according to Elance. It’s worth noting that the iPad made its debut in the Top 50 IT Skills List in this edition of the report, even though the period it covers stretches back to before the device went on sale.

Demands for cloud computing-related skills are on the rise as well, with Amazon Web Services and related technologies moving up the Top 50 IT Skills List  (if you’re interested in cloud computing, you should check out our Structure conference in June).

As I’ve pointed out before, while the Elance data is worth noting, you have to take it with a large pinch of salt as it only covers jobs posted on Elance and as such, is not representative of the wider market. Also, some of the job categories in the report sound very similar, and likely overlap — how different is “Online Writing” from “Web Content,” for example?

Are you seeing an increase in demand for your social media skills?

Photo by stock.xchng user leocub

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1. PHP
2. HTML
3. Article Writing
4. Graphic Design
5. Content Writing
6. CSS
7. MySQL
8. WordPress*
9. Adobe Flash
10. Photohsop

The venerable PHP has been in the top spot for much of the year, so it makes sense that the team at Elance have declared it their 2009 MVP. Overall, the top 10 looks much the same as it did last time I last reported on the Elance Work Index back in July, but there are a few changes: Joomla! no longer appears in the list, design-related skills (Graphic Design and Flash) have slipped a few spots and Article Writing has gained a few places. While I’m critical of some of the categorization used here (how different is “Article Writing” than “Content Writing,” really?), and you need to bear in mind that these are results drawn from only one marketplace, it is an interesting snapshot of the current freelance jobs market.

Despite the state of the economy — or perhaps because of it, as more businesses are outsourcing work that would have once been done in-house — one spot of good news for freelancers is that technology is both the strongest and fastest-growing sector, job-wise, with IT services worth over $30 million delivered through the site in 2009.

*Disclosure: WordPress is produced by Automattic, a company that is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True Partners.

PHP developers: Are your skills in as much demand as ever?

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PartnerUp

PartnerUp is like match.com, but for businesses. You list your skills and available projects (called opportunities) and can check out the assets of others to see if there’s a fit. There’s a directory in which you can list your business, and add promising-looking contacts to your address book. You can create or join groups that focus on particular topics of interests and different levels of expertise. There are also helpful forums where you can ask or answer questions about business, or anything else for that matter. The service has a free basic account, along with a premium plan. 

KiWork

KiWork works like PartnerUp and offers similar functionality. Similarly to PartnerUp you can also join or create groups (called teams in this app). The look and feel isn’t as slick as PartnerUp, but it does provide many more useful features for free. As a matter of fact, the only fee is for unlimited team members (the first three are free).

Refural

Refural is a tool that encourages people to make referrals by compensating them for their efforts. It’s a very simple app. There aren’t even user accounts; all you need to get going is your email address. For more detail, check out Thursday’s recent post about the app.

ReferralKey

ReferralKey is a growing network of professionals that focuses on the fine art of the referral, much like Refural. However, ReferralKey has been around a lot longer. There are different types of plans all based on the amount of features you’re after. For example, the basic plan allows you to send unlimited referrals and you’re allowed to receive up to three referrals yourself. After your third referral, you can choose the $10/month (Silver Key) or $20/month (Gold Key) plans, which offer escalating perks and benefits. I like this unusual method of giving new users a way to test drive the service. You don’t have to pay until you’ve actually received referrals and started making money from it.

Elance

Elance has been around for a long time — since 1999. We’ve covered it often here on WWD. It’s still basically like match.com meets monster.com for freelancers. You can bid on new projects or find talented freelancers to work with. If you’re looking for a way to breathe new life into a project or if you want to find some extra work, Elance can be very useful.

iFreelance

iFreelance follows the lead carved out by the veteran Elance, but has a look and feel more reminiscent of craigslist. While it definitely doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that Elance does, it does have the basics and might make a good place to post projects and search for business opportunities.

What are some other ways that you use the web to find great resources for projects?

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PHP still holds the No. 1 spot (as it has since February), but what’s more interesting are the “movers and shakers” this month. In particular, jobs in the “Graphic Design” and “Adobe Flash” categories have leaped up the index this month to end up in second and third places overall (up ten and six spots from last month, respectively) — this is good news for designers. Another big mover is jobs in the “Joomla!” category (breaking into the top 10 by rising 10 places to eighth), suggesting that there’s increasing demand for people skilled in the open-source CMS.

It’s more of a mixed bag for writers: While “Copywriting” (up 11 places to 23rd), “Editing” (up 16 spots to 48th)  and “Proofreading” (up 15 spots to 44th) are all winners, “Article Writing” (down five places to 7th) and “Online Writing” (down 12 places to 29th) are dropping down the index.

While some of these categories sound too similar to take this index all that seriously (how different is “Online Writing” from “Web Content,” really?) and you should remember that this is taking into account only jobs posted on one site, it’s still worth noting as a snapshot of the current freelance marketplace.

Here’s the Elance Online Work Index Top 10 for July.

1. PHP (–)
2. Graphic Design (+10)
3. Adobe Flash (+6)
4. MySQL (-1)
5. HTML (-1)
6. Web Content (+1)
7. Article Writing (-5)
8. Joomla! (+10)
9. CSS (-4)
10. WordPress (-2)

(Disclaimer: WordPress is produced by Automattic, a company that is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True Partners.)

Designers: Are you noticing an increase in demand for your skills recently?

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