2010 will be an interesting year for the writing profession and for writing in general. We have many professional writers that were newspaper staff writers or staff writers for magazines that are out of work and will be hitting the freelance seen. Obviously, freelance writing is a competitive business, and it might be difficult for those who have excellent writing skills, lots of experience, but not a lot of business skills who are trying to break into the business.

We also see that there is a gap between the quality of writing, for instance those folks that learned how to write by posting on their blog, and those that have learned how to write from journalism college courses. Online writing has gotten completely interesting in that the articles you read, and the content that is available runs from atrocious to the superb quality you'd find in a literary writing contest.

Some say that the age of Twitter and text messaging is dummying down our population, and destroying the written word. Many believe that this may be the last era of fine literature. And whereas, that maybe true, it is good to see that the average citizen is getting at least some practice writing, even if it is only in their electronic journal or blog.

With so many writers competing for peanuts in online writing it is also taking its toll on the profession, as many new entrants which don't have near the writing skill are bidding on jobs and providing content. This aspect of writing is causing a price war, and driving many people out of the business.

One of the most unfortunate situations we see in writing profession is the use of artificial intelligence software that produces content. Interestingly enough, these AI software systems are getting better, and soon they will be able to produce creative works, or novels.

Eventually, the quality of that writing will improve, and a human reader will not be able to tell the difference between something created by a computer, or a writer. That is a scary thought for a freelance writer, although some do not believe this will ever happen. I have news for them however, it is happening right now; they just don't see it yet.

In the world of online article writing, we see that many folks are hiring people out of India who will write a 350 to 450 word article for $1-$2. You must remember that in India making two dollars a day it is a good amount of money for someone. So, if they know English and work real hard to produce two articles a day, they can live in the middle class. This makes things tough on writers who live in first world countries who must compete and wish to make $.10 a word minimum.

We also see that there is AI derivative software that can take one article and make it into five by rearranging the sentences and paragraphs. If a human writer is hired to write 10 articles at two dollars each, and then an Internet content provider runs those through an AI derivative software writing program they can turn those 10 articles into 50 articles. Thus their costs becomes only $.40 per article if they paid two dollars each for the originals from India.

It is not my intention to be an alarmist here, I am only telling you the trends that we see, while studying these issues in the market place at our think tank. And I hope you will please consider this.