Mountain View Top Stories of 2011

Last Dec. 31, Mountain View Patch was only three months old and though we had covered interesting things, like the major and , but we didn't have many stories that stood out as our top or biggest.

However 2011 sure made up for it!

As the year nears its end, let's revisit the most popular stories on Mountain View Patch.

1. (June 23, 2011): Pulitzer Prize winner reporter and former Mountain View resident Jose Antonio Vargas told the staff of the Mountain View High School Oracle newspaper his deepest secret—and they kept it.
   
   
2. (May 5, 2011): Eningeers and other developers critical employees for Silicon Valley companies often arrive from their countries with limited work visas. But if they don’t get their permanent resident cards within the six years their H-1B visas are valid, they usually have to uproot themselves and return home.
   
   
3. NASA Ames scientists confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting two stars, like the fictional planet Tatooine in Star Wars.
   
   
4. (Dec. 3, 2011): The battle of the web browsers continues, and Google has surged ahead of its Mountain View rival Firefox.
   
   
5. (Mar. 1, 2011): SmugMug? It's a subscription-based, online photo-sharing website that provides unlimited photo uploads, safe back up, easy sharing, customization, image protection and privacy features.
   
   
6. (July 27, 2011): Patch continuously updated this news item as the 2011 National Geographic World Championship got underway Wednesday morning at Google's headquarters in Mountain View.
   
   
7. o (July 27, 2011): Alex Trebek ambled slowly onto the platform at Charlie's Cafe in Google and immediately cut to the chase of why he was on crutches.
   
   
8. (Aug. 22, 2011)Three arrests have been made seven years after the drive-by-shooting of 17-year-old Alex Fernandez in Mountain View, the FBI and the Santa Clara County Violent Gang Task Force announced today.
9. (Sept. 23, 2011) LinkedIn has quickly become a major player in the social networking sphere—growing on the New York Stock Exchange, expanding its offices around the world and adding interactive features that align it with sites such as Facebook.
10. (July 8, 2011) NASA Ames Research Center invited the public to watch Atlantis launch into space.