In the News:
There are some pretty amazing off-site NationStates sites out there, but the best one I've seen is this one for the region The New Meritocracy. It's got it all: a news page, a forum, and a very cool Census, using the NationStates XML feed.
http://merit.jink.org/nm.php
All is Revealed
Last night we ran a scan to work out how many of each nation type there are in NationStates. Who dominates the community: free-market ideologues, anti-state libertarians, psychotic dictators, iron-fist socialists... or someone else? The results are slightly surprising -- see for yourself.
http://www.nationstates.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi
Spoiler warning: this page contains a list of every UN classification type in the game.