More evidence that domain owners are in the right place at the right time. A new report from the Kelsey Group predicts that money spent on local advertising online will soar 129% over the next five years while local ad spending in traditional media (newspapers, radio, TV, etc.) will decline another 20% over the same period.

The operator of the .info registry, Afilias, has released a detailed new report on the progress the first “new” global TLD has made since its introduction 8 years ago. Also, a team of domainers is celebrating an upset win over a previously unbeaten team in India’s prestigious Mumbai Corporate Cricket Championship.

The new weekly domain sales report is out at DNJournal.com. The high end of the market stirred from its slumber this week with three of the year’s six highest sales reported over the past 7 days. Those sales totaled more than $700,000. Our new all extension Top 20 chart features 16 .coms, 3 ccTLDs and a .net.

New research from comScore shows the recession is driving a huge wave of new traffic to search terms related to financial matters, traffic that adds value to related generic domain names. Also today, some notes on Sedo’s acquisition of RevenueDirect and Aftermarket.com’s Domainer Mardi Gras online auction.

We are en route back home to Florida after stops in New Orleans and Ohio. Some things you need to know while we are making the trip; our weekly domain sales report will be pushed back one day due to our travel commitments and while we are in the air today, news may come of a major domain industry acquisition.

The first Domainer Mardi Gras conference closed Saturday. We have photos and highlights from the final day in New Orleans where attendees enjoyed brunch at a restaurant founded in 1832 before heading to an afternoon domain auction where Voodoo.com conjured up a $300,000 sale.

Here is a link to DN Journal’s Friday photos and highlights from the Domainer Mardi Gras conference in New Orleans – a day featuring the keynote address from author/politician Tim Burns, a full round of seminars and a raucous Bourbon Street balcony party after the sun went down.

We have photos and highlights from the opening day of the Domainer Mardi Gras conference in New Orleans Thursday – everything from the opening cocktail hour to a messy but marvelous New Orleans crawfish boil and eye-popping Mardi Gras parades along St. Charles Avenue.

Verisign’s latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, covering the 4th quarter of 2008, is now out and it showed another big jump in worldwide domain registrations from the previous year. Total registrations in all extensions rose 16% to 177 million, with country codes rising even faster – up 22% to 71.1 million. We take a closer look at the numbers.