It’s been a little while since I posted site updates and I’ve received quite a few questions about the survey in particular. So here’s some quick news on what’s happening over here:

The Survey … 300 hours and counting
So it turns out that compiling data from over three thousand people is actually quite a difficult job. In retrospect this seems fairly obvious, but somehow this thought didn’t really cross our minds when we decided to run the freelancer survey last year. By my quick calculation we’ve spent about 300 man hours on the project now.

The good news is we’re on the home stretch, the data has been compiled, evaluated, graphed and I began formatting it into a PDF this morning. I’d give an ETA … but let’s face it, that hasn’t been working out very well for the survey thus far!

So again, I’m sorry it’s taken so long, all I can say is we’re putting in a lot of work

1000 Copies of The Book Sold
We recently sold our 1,000th copy of the How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer book which is really amazing. We’ve commissioned two people - a freelancer and an editor - to work on a second edition of the book which will be made available as a PDF to anyone who has already purchased the ebook or paperback. The feedback has been really good, but we’re all about improving things to the max around here!

Also I was recently interviewed on Problogger about the whole book writing experience. I even provided a graph of how sales went on the site, so if you are interested in writing an ebook/book via a blog, I hope you’ll find it useful reading.

Other News
We’ve had two new FreelanceSwitch applications developed and they are both ready for rollout. They are a document library for freelancers to submit their quotes, invoices, and other working docs to, and a client analyzer to let you use the 80/20 principle on your client list. You can expect to see them both in February!

Our job board is going strong with just over a hundred jobs posted at any one time and plenty of people subscribed. We’re looking into possibly making the software for the board open source, so that other people can make use of it too.

And in just over two months it’s going to be our one year anniversary! I am working on plans to make it a big birthday bash. You know on that subject, one day we should have a global freelancer conference, wouldn’t that be cool!