The Monday following “Black Friday” is a huge shopping day for consumers, and as a result, retailers recently started to post great online sales on this Monday, which was yesterday. “Cyber Monday” is the term for this day, coined by the National Retail Federation, who incidentally happens to own CyberMonday.com. It will be interesting to see the results of retailers and websites for Cyber Monday, both in terms of revenue and traffic when they begin reporting these results later this week or next week.

One way to see online trends is by using the Reinvent Index to track their Shopping category. Ironically enough, Reinvent owns BlackFriday.com, and as Sahar pointed out, Reinvent was cross-promoting many of their retail domain names with BlackFriday.com. If you visited HDTV.com on Friday, there was a button on the top left corner of the site encouraging visitors to click through to BlackFriday.com for some great shopping deals.

I don’t own any retail or ecommerce domain names, so my traffic statistics may not be relevant, however, I think they show the activity of people who are online:

Burbank.com – up 69.5% from Sunday
Burbank.com – up 36.9% from last week

Lowell.com – up 44.3% from Sunday
Lowell.com – up 18.1% from last week

TropicalBirds.com – up 40.2% from Sunday
TropicalBirds.com – up 32.7% from last week

FuelAssistance.com – up 252.9% from Sunday
FuelAssistance.com – up 66.7% from last week

ElliotsBlog.com – up 102.4% from Sunday
ElliotsBlog.com – up 2.4% from last week

People frequently ask me what I think are the most important domain extensions to own for development and for protective purposes. My off the cuff first response is typically “.com and maybe .org.”

I registered a set of domain names for a new company a month ago, and I looked back on the names I bought this morning. I registered the .com for the primary website, as well as the .net, .org and .info for protective purposes. I believe these extensions have garnered the most recognition and trust amongst consumers, and I believe they are the most important to register. I don’t think anyone would try to pass themselves off as this company, but these are the extensions I care enough about to register.

This isn’t earth shattering news by any stretch, but just a tidbit of information about my new registration habits and thoughts.