Occasionally when filling in on-line forms I ran across the location of “US Minor Outlying Islands”. 
This always struck me as an unfortunate name for the former trust territories and other US dependencies, although an accurate reflection of whatever awareness most US citizens had. It seemed a lovely designation for those of us, 400 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart and 1000 miles from the nearest US state capitol, to embrace as our own.
It’s ironic to find an appropriate an Internet domain for us because it was withdrawn for being unused.
Web chucks ‘.um’ domain
POSTED: 1:34 p.m. EST, January 25, 2007
NEW YORK (AP) — The list of Internet domain names just got shorter.The Internet’s key oversight agency decided recently to yank “.um” — for U.S. “minor outlying islands.”
No one was using it anyhow, and the organization that has run “.um” — the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute — no longer wanted to bother.
So the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided unanimously last week to eliminate it entirely, bringing the list of domains to 264. There are still separate domains for larger U.S. territories, including “.gu” for Guam and “.vi” for the U.S. Virgin Islands.”
click to enlargeThe Unorganized Borough is that part of the U.S. state of Alaska not contained in any of its 16 organized boroughs. It encompasses over half of Alaska’s area, 970,500 km² (374,712 square miles), an area larger than France and Germany combined. As of the 2000 census 13% of Alaskans (81,803 people) reside in it.
Unique among the United States, Alaska is not entirely subdivided into organized county equivalents. To facilitate census taking in the vast unorganized area, the United States Census Bureau, in cooperation with the state, divided the unorganized borough into 11 census areas beginning with the 1970 census.
For information about the Unorganized Borough see
For information on Alaska’s communities and all the boroughs EXCEPT the Unorganized, see
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* Aleutians West Census Area
* Bethel Census Area
* Dillingham Census Area
* Nome Census Area
* Prince of Wales – Outer Ketchikan Census Area
* Skagway-Hoonah-Angoon Census Area
* Southeast Fairbanks Census Area
* Valdez-Cordova Census Area
* Wade Hampton Census Area
* Wrangell-Petersburg Census Area
* Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area