One additional reason why NASA needs to embed videos and such: many schools, libraries and workplaces are blocking Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and other video & social networking websites.

One of worst aspects of the NASA website is the awful search features. The NASA websites are very balkanized and I often have to wander around the site(s) for long periods of time looking for the information I need. Often I get lost in the multiple layers of sites.

And please, please get rid of the launch countdown timers for missions! Although dramatic & cool, they don’t provide the info we need (ie we would like to know when a launch is occurring not how long we have to wait until it does).

First of all, thank you for your detailed response to many of our suggestions.

In the Website Inputs document you said: “I don’t necessarily agree that an embed link is necessary to get the word out about a video; good content will do that itself. Others may disagree.” and so I’d like to clarify why I think embed links are important. I ask myself the question, are we interested in (1) the general public coming to the official website or are we more interested in (2) the general public learning about NASA? I think the answer is (2), which I think means we need to bring the content to them (and not necessarily bring them to us). I think the NASA website has done a great job of that through YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. I also think that allowing official NASA content to be embeddable would help spread NASA content better than just a simple link would do. A link requires the user to leave the site they are currently at (which they may not be interested in doing). Whenever I think of content that has spread virally I usually think of YouTube videos. In my opinion the reason they are so viral is because they are literally everywhere on the internet (not just on YouTube).

Here’s an extra suggestion I didn’t see answered on the Website inputs document: Allow website users to vote up or down an article just like the websites Digg.com and Reddit.com do (or alternatively continue using the existing rating system) and then have a NASA “top stories” page that has the highest ranked stories.