Misuse of question marks?

I've noticed an annoying misuse of the question mark recently, and its becoming more ubiquitous. It seems many people are using it in place of an exclamation mark. I'm not sure if this is being done on purpose or whether it's just a sign of the illiterate times. And it surely can't be by accident as the respective keys on the keyboard could hardly be further apart from each other. But, maybe it's an Australian thing; we have been known to inflect the ends of our sentences to sound like we're asking a question. In any case, this misuse in writing reaaally pisses me off.