There's a part of the homepage that very few users were looking at. If you went to the homepage, I'd bet that you missed it several times over the last several years. Most of our visitors do. It was a little graphic in the right hand column about two-thirds of the way down the page. And for the last four months or so, it has said "2012" in really big digits in four different places.

And now it's gone.

We're talking about the “tag cloud” that appeared under the "What are people interested in?" area in the right hand column of the page. It was that nebulous-looking area on the homepage that showed you the popular search terms from the past day, week, and month in different font sizes depending upon their popularity. And the reality of it was that it was a cool feature to look at in 2007 when we launched the current design of the site, but it wasn't a very useful tool for our actual audience.

However, the concept of sharing what are people interested in is still very, very useful. You'll find it on some of the best Web sites out there. On CNN.com, they have “NewsPulse.” On the New York Times web site, they have the “Most Popular” section. And it's on countless other sites.

So taking some of the standard-bearers’ approaches and putting a NASA twist on them, we reinvented that box to hopefully provide a ton of more useful information. We ended up giving it a multi-layered tab approach with three areas of interest:

• A "Most Viewed" tab that looks at the top stories, images, videos and interactive features in separate lists.
  
  
• A "Top Rated" tab shows the top user-rated pages on the site for the last week.
  
  
• And an "Editor's Picks" tab that showcases links selected by the Web site staff based upon popular pages that people often say are hard to find.

We hope that this provides more useful information to you than the previous 'tag cloud.' A more standard list of titles with links should already present a more intuitive interface compared to the different search words of smaller and larger font sizes. Let us know what you think of this. We hope it takes things from 'cloudy' to clear and useful.

Does it work better for you? Are there other hard-to-find links that we should work to put into the "Editor's Pick" tab?

As promised in the last post, yesterday we rolled out a new NASA Television schedule page. This page shows NASA's three television channels listed much like you'd see listings in your local newspaper with blocks of time indicating which program is on which channel. We hope this small improvement makes the online program schedule easier to read.

This change also combines program information into one place instead of the old model of three different schedules depending upon whether something was regularly scheduled, a live event, or a mission event. Now the schedules for all three channels are listed on one page. Additionally, when a user hovers their mouse over the program title, they see a small window open that has either a description of the program or a link for more information. This was added in response to user feedback that more information was sometimes necessary, especially on cryptically named television programs.

Listings of upcoming programs, events and features on NASA TV's Public, Education and Media channels now can be accessed easily in the NASA TV section.

Stay tuned for more changes coming soon to NASA.gov.

You might have noticed a condensed homepage that launched earlier today. In response to your feedback on the old 'NASA TV & Video' box, we're trying a new approach to surface different types of multimedia without burying some content in "hidden" tabs.

(Image Right: The Old "NASA TV & Video" Box)

Combining the NASA TV channels, on-demand video, interactive features and podcasts & vodcasts into a single box allowed us to shrink the page and reduce a little "clutter." As a result, we shrunk the blogs box to half its size, allowing us to showcase only the most recent blog posts.

We've also removed the polls and quizzes box from the homepage, since our stats showed only a small percentage of our users were interacting with it. We'll continue to engage users with polls and quizzes elsewhere on the site, but we want to focus the homepage on the most useful information for our visitors.

Other things that have been on our to-do list for a while include the cleaning up of links on the homepage in the right column. By combining some similar links (like NASA Directorates and Mission Support Offices), and eliminating redundant links, we were able to tighten up that right column. We hope this will help streamline items.

(Image Left: The New "NASA Multimedia" Box)

This is all part of an effort to slim down our addiction to links all over the homepage, since our audience has consistently asked us to eliminate clutter. This change has already helped us eliminate about 25 links, and we'll keep chopping it down.

There are more changes still to come. For example, before the new year, we'll being rolling out a new schedule for NASA TV that works more like the TV channel listings you've seen on the big Internet portals.

As our turkey comas wear off from Thanksgiving and the chilled air of December settles in, a New Year looms around the corner. 2009 held many large events for NASA.gov. Almost 392,000 people watched the LCROSS impact video live on NASA.gov with 5.4 million visitors simultaneously looking at the NASA.gov Web site, the second-largest online event in our history. We also set a new bandwidth record during the LCROSS impact with data transfers of over 75.5 gigabits per second spread among live video and the Web site. All-told during the LCROSS impact event, we moved a total amount of data equal to over 85 terabytes or about the equivalent of 127,327 CD's.

NASA.gov also set milestones with the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission during STS-125. In addition to all the normal online activities that any shuttle mission usually garners, astronaut Mike Massimino captivated space enthusiasts around the world via Twitter by sending the first tweet from space. His Earth-shattering tweets also managed to amass @Astro_Mike over a million followers on Twitter, rivaling the likes of Ashton Kutcher. Additionally, the launch of STS-125 also resulted in our fourth-largest online event in NASA.gov history.

NASA delved deeper into our enthusiastic group of followers on Twitter by hosting 'Tweetups' where Twitter users learn about our programs and speak with astronauts. Thus far, Tweetups have been held at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. and at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Demand for attending the Tweetup to learn about STS-129 and view the launch of the Space Shuttle from Florida culminated with the filling of our 100 registration slots, plus all the spaces on our wait-list, in less than twenty minutes.

Other ground was broken in NASA's online communications with this fall's Operation Ice Bridge campaign, which featured an unprecedented level of near-real time coverage across cyberspace with tweets on Twitter, Webisodes on YouTube, photos on Flickr, and a blog on NASA Blogs. This precedent-setting social media coverage exceeded all expectations and is something that we hope to repeat in the years ahead.

Another large online event for NASA.gov was the launch of the Ares I-X Development Test flight. While lasting just a few minutes, the intrigue of the new rocket and it's successful test launch showed sustained interest in the days leading up to the launch, even after the first launch attempt was scrubbed.

Now that we've talked about some of our online highlights from 2009, what other NASA events interested you from throughout the year?

There was something different this time.  From the veteran reporters and public affairs officers at the NASA News Center to mission managers in the firing room, NASA's Kennedy Space Center was buzzing about the fresh burst of enthusiasm as the clock ticked toward liftoff of Atlantis on STS-129.

In the shadow of the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building and just a quick stroll from the famous countdown clock sat a white tent filled with 100 NASA Twitter followers from 21 states, the District of Columbia as well as Canada, England, Morocco and New Zealand.

They came to Florida from all over for a two-day Tweetup (an informal meet-up of people using the social media tool Twitter), including a tour of the center and a chance to talk to the people that help send the shuttle to space. They got an up close look at shuttle hardware and face-to-face time with astronauts and reporters. Some were pleasantly surprised to become part of the story themselves, as members of the news media came looking for interviews.

But for many, it was simply about the joy of being there. One was overheard telling a reporter, "NASA could've bused us out to a big field and let us watch the launch and we would've been thrilled, but they did so much more."

So what's all the fuss about? Think of Twitter as an ongoing conversation with a few thousand of your closest friends. There may have been only 100 "tweeps" in that tent, but many more were following the conversation using the #nasatweetup hashtag (988 according to one metrics site). The people who attended have more than 150,000 followers among them. And many media outlets reported on the event, spreading the excitement even further.

It's not just "how many?" but "who?" Some web users, no matter how much they're interested in space, aren't coming directly to NASA.gov for their news.  There's a whole generation of web users who get their news and share their interests on social media sites. Engaging with them on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and other sites is bringing the story of NASA to new audiences that may not otherwise connect with us.

Tweeters who came to NASA Headquarters in October got to talk live to the International Space Station, and others have talked with shuttle crews and scientists exploring Mars and Saturn. About a dozen NASA Astronauts are tweeting already, sometimes from orbit. One -- Mike Massimino (@Astro_Mike) -- has more than a million followers. You can find NASA Twitter accounts and other social media efforts on the NASA Connect page.

Let's keep the conversation going.

Maybe Walt Disney was right when he commissioned the song, “It’s a Small World (After All)” in the 1960s. At the time, commercial aircraft and other modes of transportation were beginning to bring folks together from the furthest reaches of the planet as never before. Fast-forward to the 1990s when the spread of the Internet made the world an even smaller place.

At the time, large scale chat rooms and instant messaging ruled the day. It was a community meeting place where people with similar interests met virtually even if they were in different parts of the world. These chat rooms provided some of the original allure of the Internet and showed how easily it could make this one small world after all.

Since then, chat rooms haven’t really changed. The rooms still bring folks together in the same virtual space, allowing them to collaborate and talk with one another. It’s not cutting-edge; it’s not high-tech. It’s just a good idea that still manages to be highly functional, even after all of these years.

Here at NASA.gov, we’ve previously hosted chats between astronauts, educators and students. Continuing this tradition, from time-to-time we’ll be hosting question and answer sessions between NASA scientists, engineers, and support personnel. It’s a chance for you to chat with the folks behind that gates at NASA and ask them anything you’d like about a given topic.

This afternoon, NASA Chats features Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, who will be online to take your questions about the Leonids meteor shower. The shower is a pretty neat thing to see and will be visible over the Americas on Tuesday morning.

Join the live chat with Bill Cooke today, Nov. 16 from 4:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. EST at: http://www.nasa.gov/connect/chat/09-094.html.

As topics come up and neat things are happening at NASA (when aren’t they?), we’ll have NASA experts answer your questions in future chats. Hopefully, the chat room just keeps proving that “it’s a small world, after all.” Now that’s pretty neat.

(Image credit: cmurtaugh on Flickr)

A big hello from the NASA.gov Web Team at NASA Headquarters. We're starting this blog to keep you informed about what's going on 'Behind the Page.' We hope to update this on a weekly basis or more frequently as needed. It'll be the place where we talk about new features in the works, respond to your e-mails and issues, and highlight intriguing things from across the NASA.gov web site. Without any further ado, let's jump right into the deep end.  

Some of you have e-mailed us, tweeted us, and inquired over the past few months suggesting that we integrate our social media into the home page more and your wishes are being answered. We've been collecting all of NASA's vast social media presences on a page that's linked in the top navigation bar under the button "Collaborate." While that page has several good resources, we've found that some folks keep missing the links to NASA's Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

As a result of this confusion, we've surveyed other leading Web sites online. Looking at these sites, we decided that maybe we weren't calling it what you all were expecting to see. We're re-labeling that button into 'Connect' instead of 'Collaborate' as that has become more of a standard label for an organization's social media section. To also help you locate the main NASA social media accounts, we've added them to a new drop-down menu that displays when you hover your mouse over the new 'Connect' button in the top navigation bar. As always, if you click on the Connect button or the new 'More Social Media…' link in the bottom of the drop-down menu, you can reach the main NASA social media page that has all of our links on it. Hopefully, this change will make our top navigation more user-friendly to everyone looking to connect with NASA on social media.

Another exciting change that's been in the works for a while is also being unveiled at the same time. In the right column of the home page we're replacing our current "Get NASA Updates" module with two new modules. The first presents updates from the @NASA Twitter feed in near-real time ; the second, smaller box allows you to sign-up for NASA updates by e-mail. We hope that displaying the Twitter feed on the home page will show a broader cross-section of material across NASA.gov, including material that won't fit into our featured spaces on the home page. Additionally, we're hoping the smaller e-mail subscription box has a better look-and-feel to fit in with everything else going on with the (admittedly, pretty busy) home page.

These changes are just the first of a series of tweaks that are coming on NASA.gov as we look at how to streamline our online presence to make it more user-friendly. We know that we have a very dedicated following of folks from every corner of cyberspace. This blog and your comments will hopefully allow us to share insight into what's in the works here at NASA and also be a forum for us to hear about what you'd like us to work on next. No promises are being made, but we'll always have an open ear.

As always, you can e-mail the NASA.gov Web Team at webcomments@hq.nasa.gov or drop us a line in the comments. We'll try to respond as time allows, but know that we read every comment and e-mail that comes through the door.