The country your currently in is selected on the list*. Nothing special right?... well depends on where you come from.
A huge amount of websites set the first item on a country drop down lists to United States. I understand the reason, if most of your visitors are from the US why would Afghanistan be the first on the list. So webmasters simply put United States and other popular countries on the top of the list.
This can be very disturbing so, instead of doing that why don't simply use the IP address of the visitor to determine where they come from and set that country as default. This is easy to do but for some reason very few do (Gmail does). I therefore decided to do it myself in the hope that somebody would use it.
First we needed to map an ip to its country of origin. I couldn't find a free web service to do this so I created this one.
http://ianj.appspot.com/countryCode
Query String Parameters
Second we locate the index in the dropdown list of the country with the country code we just got. At last we simply select the item.
View source for this page to see the code.