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THE TINY ISLAND WITH A HUGE WEB PRESENCE

(CNN) -- If you're among the companies vying for one of the nearly 2,000 new generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, you've got big pockets. The application alone costs about $185,000.

But if you're just an average Joe building your own website or blog, there are much cheaper options out there. One of the most popular is .tk. It's a country code top-level domain, similar to .ca for Canada or .fr for France. But .tk stands for a country you've probably never heard of. It's called Tokelau.

Places don''t get much more remote than Tokelau. It would make a great backdrop for a desert-island television series. The only problem would be getting the crew there. What appears on a map as three tiny pinpoints in the midst of the Pacific Ocean are the country's tiny atolls, bringing the total size of Tokelau to a whopping 4 square miles.

But a recent report released by Verisign, the global registry operator for .com and .net, found that .tk is the third-most popular country code top-level domain (or ccTLD) behind only Germany (.de) and the United Kingdom (.uk).