Apparently Japanese telecoms companies are trying to convince the world that written Japanese does not already have enough characters.

These additional characters are used to depict emotions and other symbols in a similar manner to SMS emoticons.

Rather than being combinations of characters, such a , which is entered as a : followed by a ) ,  to represent a smiley in the Latin character sets, there is a movement to create a whole range of  new symbols, into Unicode, which include colour and animation.

At present, they are exchanged in SMS messages by using privately agreed character codes, but there is pressure to add these new emoji ideographs into the Unicode specification.

Some of the key problems that adding Emoji to the Unicode standards would present include:

1. Adding shapes to Unicode, which has carefully remianed indepentant of how glyphs are drawn
2. Adding colour requirements to Unicode, which again has had no logical need to specify colours for characters
3. Adding the concept of animation definitions to characters, which is well outside the range of a character set definition

In Australia, Queensland’s Tourist Authority is pulling off a phenomenal publicity stunt. Which may be a victim of its own success, as the web site for a single job seems to be barely accessible because of the quantity of hits on their web site.

Queensland are advertising a well paid real job, under the slogan “The best job in the world“, for six month on the the Great Barrier Reef paradise island called Hamilton Island.

The aim of using this job to attract international interest in Hamilton and the other reef islands seems to be being met too well. In the few days since the Queensland Tourist authority started advertising the island reef job, it has attracted the attention of British, American and Japanese news media.

For the last three days, http://www.islandreefjob.com/ has rarely been accesible because of the overwelming web traffic.