Word of the day: gobsmacked.

One of our new clients, a successful entrepreneur in the gourmet food business, was very concerned about working with people so far from his office in New York. Although he is well-traveled and has done business all over the world, his core team was always local.

“How can you work with people you’ve never met? How can you trust them? How can you take their measure?”

Answer: “Two years ago it was impossible. Now you can.”

Most of our projects involve us (as strategists and general contractors) pulling together the best people we know. In the last month, we’ve worked with programmers, web designers, and project managers from Pittsburgh, Toronto, Rome, New York, Bombay, and New Zealand.

It hasn’t been a problem; for the most part, it’s been liberating. Our client was gobsmacked. He had a hard time believing that this could be effective. A few years ago, it wouldn’t have been.

Why? What changed?

New tools that actually work. Here are five we use. They are easy to use and cheap:

• Video chat (we use the built-in Apple app)
• Skype (as we discovered recently, even works for 3-way calls with a non-Skype phone)
• Thinkature, a web-based whiteboard/bulletin board/mind-mapping app (early days, but great)
• Google Calendar, which finally frees calendars and notification from platform compatibility issues
• Basecamp, a simple and effective web-based collaborative project management web service. If you want unlimited projects, or you want to install on your own servers, we like ActiveCollab.

Taken together, these and similar tools have finally made long-distance, work-from-home, international collaboration possible. With free voice and video chat, you can finally “take their measure” without meeting them face-to-face, and the other tools make it possible to get work done. Long-distance collaboration over the web is finally possible.

But don’t take my word for it.

Brian Clark’s Copyblogger has joined B5 Media. This is an important decision for both of them. They’ve decided to take a big bet on each other. Brian, whose work I admire greatly, says that his decision was due in large part to the friendship he struck up with B5 member Darren Rowse, who runs the hugely-traveled ProBlogger. Brian is in Dallas; Darren is in Australia.

If Brian and Darren have met face-to-face I’d be surprised; if they’ve met twice I’d be gobsmacked.

Tags: Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, b5 media, Copyblogger, Problogger, Thinkature, Google Calendar, Skype, tools for Internet collaboration, Internet sharing

Posted by Antony in: Blogs, General