Above: Grand Canyon, Arizona photo by Bill and Kent. Below right: Sheki, Azerbaijan photo by Ben Paarmann. Both photos Creative Commons licensed, via Flickr. Click either image to see original.

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis has a new entertainment site called vita.mn. It's a cool site (Steve Yelvington, a Star Tribune alumnus, agrees), packed with Web. 2.0 features.

What I found most interesting was the site's TLD (top-level domain): .mn. That's the official U.S. Postal Service abbreviation for Minnesota. Of course, like all U.S. states, Minnesota doesn't have a unique TLD. Rather, the Star Tribune is using the TLD for Mongolia.

Well, I thought this was clever -- a way to tell readers, "Hey, this site is about Minnesota!" And I'd bet a lot of domain names not available as .com might be available in other countries.

This got me thinking: How many other state-focused sites could use country-based TLD's? Almost half, it turns out. Here's what I found (I haven't checked to see if these countries allow U.S.-based sites to register domains):