In Feb. 2010, we published our annual list of trends and predictions for the year. As part of our Prediction #5: The Top Dozen Business & Technology Stories in 2010 Will Include… we said one of the top stories would be “The freelancing of the US workforce — or how we’ll all be contractors or ‘perma-temps’ in the future (especially given the jobless nature of the recovery).”

In an article in June 2010, Newsweek ran an interesting article that validated the above prediction: “The Vanishing 9-to-5 Job: How the recession is accelerating a cultural shift in the corporate world toward more flexible workdays.” And on Sept. 1, the New York Times ran an
article, “New Job Means Lower Wages for Many” that looked at the impact of a lack of steady jobs.

Keep in mind that the point of the trends is to identify story angles the media will be working on for the oncoming year, and then developing approaches to get clients into those stories.

Meanwhile, in the same list of top business and tech stories we expected to see, we predicted a lot of attention paid to “Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft and EMC vs. HP vs. Oracle.” We’ve been right about part of that: Google vs. Apple has been a big story, bigger than Google vs. Microsoft.

(Check out It’s Apple vs. Google in the New Phone Fight, that appeared in Newsweek in June.) But there’s a version of that we missed on: Dell vs HP (fighting Over 3Par). Can’t get ’em all.

As always, we’ll do a recap at the end of the year to determine how well we did overall with our list, breaking out the trends we got right and the ones that we did not.