Via a weekly email from Elance, I got a link to the following report: <http://www.elance.com/php/landing/main/ElanceSkillIndex.php>. (It pre-selected "Web & Programming" for me, but your mileage may vary.)

Elance is a marketplace for independent contractors and consulting agencies...not really like Clear Ink so much as the agencies down the line who will churn out production work. I find this data fascinating because it suggests how big the market is for a particular service and how many people there are serving it.  The numbers shown on this page are how many service providers there are. Clicking on the most of them will tell you how many open jobs there are. It looks like clicking on low demand skillsets return search results for providers.

For instance, for PHP I see 11,463 service providers and 1,906 open jobs. Logically, as a service provider, you'd want to be in an area with lots of open jobs and relatively low number of providers. As a buyer of services, you probably want to open jobs where there are the most number of service providers.

Of course there are complex issues to consider. Some of the technologies presented are subset of others. If you do ASP.NET, you probably also can do ASP. If you do Javascript, you certainly do DHTML and Ajax--even XHTML for that matter. Also, there is no distinction here between PHP 4 and PHP 5, but shops not experienced with PHP 5's object oriented features are probably comparable to shops who only do the old style of ASP. The most significant takeaway is that this report is not a recommendation to choose PHP because it's at the top of the list. Let's set aside the non-optimal breakout of the skills and look at the consumer to producer ratios.

I believe the numbers for Com are wrong. When I picked a developer on the list of "Com Experts", the skill wasn't listed. Since most of use have .com in our domains, I suspect Elance's search engine is making a mistake. Therefore, it looks like there's good opportunities for SEO, HTML, Flash, MySQL, Joomla and PHP. I'm somewhat surprised to see Joomla up there. My myopic view has been that Drupal is the darling of the CMS crowd.

If I put on my client hat, I might be encouraged to go with Drupal because there are 956 developers fighting over a measly 32 projects.

I also see that "Social Networking" is right in the middle of the list. That's great news for Clear Ink, or any agency looking to sell more of these types of leading edge services. As an agency aimed at leading clients with innovative techniques, you want to spend your time keeping yourselves at an expert level on the new trends and leave the commodity services (e.g. HTML) to partners.