With the costs of petrol rising fast and companies feeling the squeeze, the home based workspace is becoming an appealing choice. Changing attitudes have been forced by a smaller pool of skilled workers to draw on and the need to look outside one's own city region or country for experienced people. Now that the internet is a core part of every 21st Century company, organisations relying on face to face communications may not be able to afford that luxury for much longer. Large central studios or expensive offices spaces can be replaced with distributed, networked and often home-based teams. Which is a great step toward the fabled perfect work/life balance that has been promised since the birth of the computer age.I have been teleworking internationally for over ten years, having been an online editor, community manager, columnist, and now IPTV producer & animatrix. One thing I have learnt from riding out the first dotcom wave is to stay small, efficient and flexible, by using creative workflows & real time collaboration tools.

At Mohawk Media we rely on a network of studios based around New Zealand to create our digital media content. Sometime email is not immediate enough to make key decisions, and which communications tools we use depends on who we are dealing with, and for what reason. We use different channels for communicating in real-time with our core crew, and partners both local and overseas using text, audio or live video chat sessions. The most immediate channel is for core crew who can instant message, email or text me and expect a reply back immediately or within the hour. I use a personal Gmail account rather than our business account for managing my daily instant messaging needs, as my crew can see if I am online and if I am free to chat.

I prefer running pre-booked online meetings than juggling telephone calls or email these days. You avoid the tyranny of overblown email lists, or having to type up minutes which can be a terrible time-waster. For partners and clients I prefer to pre-book online meeting times using a Campfire chat room connected to my Basecamp project folder. Campfire lets me upload documents, chat real time then save a transcript of the session to send out. Participants no longer have to be in the office for meetings, and the basic Campfire account allows up to four people to chat concurrently for free. You can scale up for more people with their paid service or scale back just as easily.

Text based chat can be fine for people who you already know, but for audio interviews or international conference calls I have used Skype. Calls are free if you are both connecting through Skype, or you can pay for the ability to call landlines worldwide & record the audio. This is how I recorded my interview with Dr Grodbort with Greg Broadmore at WETA Workshop. A decade ago video conferencing was only available to those with the huge bandwidth required, to watch jerky video and listen to garbled audio. Now anyone with a webcam, average laptop and headset can happily chat in real time. There is a Skype video service with free Skype to Skype sessions, and I recently found a useful looking tool with the curious name Oovoo. It offer live video chats with up six people, looks perfect for small creative teams with a free trial option. Dim Dim is another conferencing tool I will be trying out with both free open source and enterprise options.

If you want to keep an eye on new collaboration tools then I suggest you join the Collaboration Group at Diigo and subscribe to an email digest to be sent new links. So go forth and collaborate wherever you or your creative team are based. There are no borders or limits in cyberspace.

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As well as being TBI's strategist & columnist, MsBehaviour is Producer & Presenter of the g33k show, Fridays, 8 pm on Alt TV. She is also Managing Directrix of Mohawk Media, which produces internet TV, 3D Animation & Machinima.