Following our usual monthly report, we present the conclusions of the recent Elance Work Index, a top provided by Elance, which ranks the most desired skills in today's online freelance work. Even if the latest report is only for the month of October, PHP skills seem to have won the competition for the number one spot in this year's top, Elance reports.

After battling it out with Graphic Design all year, exchanging the number one spot between them several times, the fall in job numbers for Graphic Designers has clearly put PHP on top of the annual rankings. This demise has been noticed starting with August when Graphic Design skills slipped out of the top two positions, slowly going down to number ten for the month of October.

This month's top ten is:
1. PHP
2. HTML
3. Article Writing
4. Content Writing
5. CSS
6. WordPress
7. Adobe Flash
8. Creative Writing
9. Photoshop
10. Graphic Design.

Analyzing the rest of the top 100 (via this link), we can see a huge number of writing-related skills like Creative Writing, Article Writing, Content Writing, Copywriting, Business Writing, Academic Writing and more.

As the team from Elance also noticed, this month's top 100 was invaded by Translation-related skills, with Spanish Translation ranked at number 77, French Translation at 83 and German Translation at 88. If all of the Translation-related jobs had been considered for one category, then all of these (including Italian and Swedish translation jobs, which almost cracked the top 100) would have ranked in the top ten.

Thanks to the huge media push and press coverage for Google's new programming language “Go,” Google Wave and to the Google Chrome OS launch due this week, a lot of Google-related jobs have managed to get in the rankings, gaining momentum as the Mountain View-based company is getting bigger and bigger. This is very visible for Android skills, which have risen 166 spots to the current 76th position.

Now that the fight for the number one spot is over, all we can do is wait and see which other skills will rank behind PHP in the 2009 top ten.