FWIW, when I registered a domain name for my company with Network Solutions several years ago (I registered the ***.net version because a Canadian company already had the ***.com domain) they sent me emails urging that I register the ***.org version as well.
My personal site, which contains similar content to that which you plan to put up, is a .net domain. (I chose .net because I thought it looked better with my domain name than .com and .org did. ) As it has been said, you don’t need to justify your content with your domain-- no one really seems to care, so long as you cough up money for the name.
Also: Community Colleges Step Up Fight to Use ‘.edu’ Internet Addresses
From last year. And just last week:
Nitpick the first: You should have gone with the .com. It’s more alliterative with your domain, and alliteration is cool.
Nitpick the second: You have no content on your site. 
It’s there. It’s just invisible.
No, this is not true. I attended Marianopolis College in Montreal for cégep (a Quebec two-year junior college granting university-preparatory and professional diplomas), and their url is http://www.marianopolis.edu .
Here’s a cite on the actual rules which states explicitly “.edu, which is restricted to use by four-year, degree-granting colleges and universities;”
http://www.icann.org/wipo/FinalReport_1.html
The fact that these rules are not strictly enforced is what leads to the OP’s question in the first place, but they are the rules nonetheless.
marianopolis.edu was registered in 1995. The rule that a .edu had to be a four-year institution went into effect in 1993. Marianopolis College may have slipped it in somehow, or their domain was originally registered before 1993, expired and deleted, then was allowed to be re-registered in 1995.
at register.com you can find a list of all the extensions & also some country codes. e.g. .TV
For fun, try ebay.com & search for names for sale. Then select highest prices first just for laughs.
I wish I could get a .gov
For those interested in playing the search engine optimisation (and directory) game, it is worth getting a .org – when all else is equal, a SE ranks a .org above a commercial site on it’s results pages. Ditto Directories.
However, there are a lot of ‘however’s’. Trying to read how each SE ranks and weights relevance-to-query factors on a web page is like cracking a safe, and that’s before considering non-page building factors like popularity and incoming links.
Probably best to just say .org is better, as a general principle, but if you’re at all in commercial competition your rivals will likely turn you in to the engines and you’ll disappear.
If viewings are important, the single most important thing I’d suggest is; spend as long as possible looking at Yahoo’s hierarchical category structure and the order in which those categories are presented on the results pages in relation to the exact terms of the query (including word order). And then choose a category to submit to.
BTW, if you can lay your hands on an academic suffix, do it 
Thanks for all the advice. So maybe I should go ahead and get a .org? I would just feel a little guilty taking something I didn’t really by right qualify to deserve. But since there is no default provided for personal web sites, why not just go ahead and help myself to whatever’s available and looks good? I’m not a business either, is my point.
I was looking at buying my domain name from hostsave.com. They give you three choices: .com, .org, or .net (no .state.us) in sight. I wanted to know the best choice from these three before making a commitment. I only plan to buy one, not all three!
If it’s just for a personal site, go ahead and get whichever one looks, or sounds, better. I really wouldn’t feel guilty about it.
For the record, I’ve registered six domain names [all for various personal reasons] and all but one of them is a .com. [The other is a .net, which I use to host web-based mail for myself.]
Thanks to Cecil’s column up on the SD home page today,
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/011102.html
I visited Rupert Sheldrake’s home page
http://www.sheldrake.org/
and found that he too is just one individual person with something to say. He evidently decided that a .org served his vision of a web site the best. So analogously I think I’ll go with that myself. Thanks, everyone.
Its actually cheap enough these days to get them all…why not corner the market on the three top ones for yourself? You don’t have to make a website for each name, you can get a cheap redirect to the main site from each one.