Cricket fans spend up big… Porn not the only malware culprit… More Australians shun retirement… IT salaries rising…

Cricket fans spend up big in Australia.

The Barmy Army and their fellow travellers spent up big in Australia for the 2006-07 Ashes Test Series and One-Day International series, according to the URS Economic Impact Study (EIS) released today by Tourism Minister Fran Bailey and Cricket Australia.

Of the 37,000 international tourists attracted by the series, 64% came specifically for the Ashes matches. Each international tourist spent nearly $10,500 and stayed for about 30 days. The two tours generated $317 million for the Australian economy and created 793 jobs.

Porn not the only malware culprit

If the only reason you avoided porn sites was the fear of malware being downloaded into your computer, you can relax. A new study by McFee’s Site Advisor operation suggests that other virtual neighbourhoods are more dangerous in this regard, reports ITWire. Music sharing sites are worse – and searches for screensavers and wallpaper are not much better.

The study looked at the proportion of search results that point to hazardous pages, using results from the AOL, Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo search engines for a list of more than 2000 common queries derived from sources such as Google Zeitgeist, Hitwise and Yahoo Buzz.

Keywords relating to adult sites returned a fairly risky 9% of hazardous pages (up from 8% last December), but music-related queries – including those for peer-to-peer software – were even worse, returning 19% dangerous results. The most dangerous search term was said to be “bearshare”.

Retirement? No thanks

Almost 20% of Australians plan to keep working until they drop, according to a new survey by recruiters Talent2. “This is up from 14% in a similar survey conducted by Talent2 in 2006.”

Talent2 believes the rise indicates the growing appreciation by Australians that the cost of retiree-living is on the increase. Health costs, longer life and higher expectations are pushing costs up – not to mention holidays, or helping the kids out with buying a house!

IT salaries rising

Good times are continuing to be experienced by IT professionals. IT salaries in Australia jumped 10% in May, as a shortfall in local technology skills continues to put upward pressure on pay rates, according to the Ambition Technology Recruitment Market Trends and Salaries Report for Winter 2007, released today by ASX-listed IT recruiter Ambition Technology, reports IT Wire.

The skills most in demand include project management, application development and J2SE. IT contracting has not returned to the heady days pre-Y2K, but the demand for short-term contractors remains strong and hourly rates have risen accordingly.

The study’s authors say senior IT manager salaries are in the $180,000 to $250,000 range, and the CIO range is from $180,000 up to $500,000 for an ASX-listed Top 300 company.