Please Sir - Can I Have Some More (Telecommuting)?

Happy Holidays! I watched "Julie and Julia" this weekend, so I'm inspired to get back to relatively more frequent blogs. You can expect more of them to be a question soliciting your comments. This should help to get both more frequent posts and more of your thoughts rather than mine.

This year I completed my epic quest to finish "The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century". It didn't take me a long time because the book is dull. Quite the opposite - it's a large book AND filled with many thought provoking concepts (leading to frequent mind-wandering while reading).

Among many topics, the book referenced a trend for more virtual work. This leads me to the question of what is missing when people don't work in the same physical locations? How important is social interaction, and how closely replicated can it be via facebook, google wave, etc?

Would love to hear your thoughts, including whether you think telecommuting and virtual work are a good idea.

Over to you...