As Doug mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been in Japan working with WSG Media for the past month. Although I’ve been back in the office for almost a week now my ‘to-do’ list seems not to be decreasing in the slightest. Instead it’s growing at a rather alarming rate.

Nevertheless, I did find the time to edit this fun little movie about our trip and thought our readers here at Tactical Thinking might enjoy some ‘light-hearted’ viewing. Enjoy…

The trip was very successful. With most of the research done and new material currently being written, things are moving along nicely. Keep your eyes peeled for further mentions of this new publication from WSG Media - it’s completely under wraps for the time being though, so my lips are sealed.

It’s something we’ve been waiting a while for here at Tactic Group, but yesterday it arrived. The guys over at WordPress posted a sneak peek of the new version (version 2.5), of their formidable blog engine.

Being ardent WordPress fans here (as it powers Tactical Thinking and is our recommended weblog solution), we’re very excited at this news. Since reading about the usability and interaction design work by Happy Cog I’ve been itching to see the end results.

The re-designed administration interface looks just as good as the new features sound. Features such as a customisable dashboard, built-in photo galleries and Gravatar support. To give you an idea of the emphasis on this major new release:

This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint — we’ve re-thought the look of WordPress, as well as how it’s organized so that you can forget about the software and focus on your own creative pursuits.

We’ll be giving this new version a whirl here in the next couple of days, as it’s reputedly very stable, and will post our early thoughts as we put it through its paces.

Update 26.03.2008: View a short screencast of the new WordPress in action.

For the last few weeks Tactic Group’s very own Keith Stubbs has been out on assignment in Japan - “Enjoying the powder and sake”.

While Japan is in peak-season and enjoying some great conditions he’s been touring various resorts updating reviews for the World Snowboard Guide, writing dispatches for various magazines and also finding time to research a new book.

Keith is joined on the trip by Steve Dowle of WSG Media, snowsports photographer Camilla Stoddart, and two female pro-riders from the UK - Posy Dixon and Vicci Miller. The journey has taken them from Nagano to Hokkaido, via Niigata; riding many new resorts along the way—and it sounds like they’re having a blast.

Regular updates and stunning photos are being posted on the WSG Japan 2008 blog. Beware - reading their adrenalin-fuelled dispatches is guaranteed to make you very jealous!

Following on from our last post on the different methods for sourcing photographic material, this week we’re bringing you Tactical Thinking’s 5 best web-based photography resources.

As a group of individuals we’ve been creating and applying web imagery for quite some time now and during the course of our web careers we’ve come across many different image resources. In fact, there are so many to choose from that this post was actually much harder to write than we first anticipated.

Gone are the days when you would send away for a stock photography CD and hope they had what you needed. Now it’s simply; ‘find a site that caters to your needs, sign up and start downloading’. What an easy life.

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