Remote work and distributed teams provides one heck of a challenge for sure. We've been finding our way by trying different things and succeeding or failing - but I certainly agree with what Jeff Atwood said about keeping up with chat and mail lists... We're very cross-platform, so video chat doesn't work all that well for us across Linux, Windows, and Mac, etc... But I think the weekly status reports to the team has been forgotten, so we'll have to start that up again. :)
Very very interesting. We've been fighting our daughter's fascination with Webkins, but it's quite similar when I look at it from the perspective of Pokemon cards in the article.