More than half a million referrals came from Facebook alone, and about 107,000 from Twitter. This is a much higher number than we usually see shared across social media. If you compare the class calculator with the other top stories of the week, usually about 5% of known referrals come from social media sites.

So why has it proven so popular with our audience? Michael Orwell, a producer at BBC Lab UK, worked closely on the survey and said one of the best things about the project was that the audience contributed to new research with top academics.

The calculator itself, produced by the BBC News Visual Journalism team in collaboration with BBC Knowledge and Learning, lets everyone engage with the new model and discover where they might fit in.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

We are busy doing some research and thinking at the moment about what people are looking for in our News apps in the longer term, but we thought that in the meantime, it was important to fix one or two bugs affecting some users of the existing app and to make it a better, slicker experience overall.

We want to make sure the current app remains a great way to get a quick overview of the top stories across a wide range of subjects, easy-to-scan on a mobile and, once the stories have loaded, handy to read offline too.

So, it will now be quicker to start up the app and to update it, and it should feel smoother and faster as you scroll and swipe through the screens and stories.

The larger homescreen images we've introduced serve two purposes:

• first, you can see what's in them more clearly and there's more room for the headline
• second, their positioning makes it clearer that you can scroll horizontally in each news category to reveal more stories (we noticed that in user testing some people assumed there were only three stories a section).

There is a new layout on iPad when you view the home screen in portrait mode - designed to show more headlines and make it easier to find the stories you're interested in.

Among the bugs that we've fixed is an issue that sometimes caused the app to get stuck when updating, and another where you sometimes saw duplicate stories within a single news category.

For our product team, these improvements required a fairly major reworking of the app's code. The good news is that they are now working from a more stable base which can be built on with new features and functionality. This revising of our code is something we've already done with our Android app, so we'll now be able to release upgrades simultaneously on both iOS and Android, which are by far the largest mobile platforms for us in terms of users. This latest update is already available internationally.

If you're a user of the app, or decide to try it out, we hope you'll like the improvements we've made. And as we think about our apps generally and plan our next steps, we'd like to hear about what you'd most like to see in future.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

My colleague, senior product manager Andrew Leimdorfer, has this update:

We are pleased to announce that we have decided on our new Knight-Mozilla fellow, Noah Veltman, who will be starting with us in January 2013.

Noah is one of eight 2013 fellows who will all be announced at this weekend's sold-out Mozilla Festival in London who will be based in news organisations around the world, including the Guardian and the New York Times.

There are so many ways that technology is changing journalism that our first challenge is going to be to make a choice about which of these areas Noah will be helping us with next year. Working on new data visualisations and developing innovative content for mobile web will be high on the list.

We welcome Noah to the team and wish all the Knight-Mozilla fellows all the best in 2013.

On 7 November, there were 16.4m unique browsers across the website and mobile, 8.1m of which came from the UK. That makes it the highest traffic day of 2012 so far and rivals our two biggest previous days during the August riots and the March Tsunami, in 2011. During the England riots, on 9 August 2011 there were there were 18.2m unique browsers, 10.9m of which came from the UK.

The peak traffic point yesterday was 07:00-08:00 GMT, which saw higher usage than lunchtime, maybe as people checked the results as soon as they woke up. UK usage figures yesterday were 50% higher than the average for 2012, and ex-UK usage was 75% higher than average.

We spent a lot of time working out how to provide the best possible service on mobile, so it's encouraging to see that nearly 5m mobile devices visited BBC News Online yesterday, a record figure for us on mobile, accounting for about 30% of all users yesterday (on an average weekday, we'd expect mobiles to account for about 24% of users).

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

Ceefax - the BBC's teletext service - finally ends its long career tonight when it is due to be switched off at 23:30 BST. There is more on this, and the history of the service, in our news story today and linked coverage.

As each part of the UK has in turn gone through the switchover to digital and lost the Ceefax service in the process, it has been a long farewell, which I have written about here before.

Now, with the analogue TV signal in Northern Ireland being switched off, the last stage in the process has arrived, and the service will come to an end.

The BBC Red Button services will carry on the Ceefax tradition of providing clear and concise news from around the UK and the world, on demand, on your TV.

Indeed the Red Button service is in the process of being reinvented for internet-enabled TV sets, and this “Connected Red Button” service will combine the simplicity of traditional Red Button with the flexibility and depth of online. My colleague Daniel Danker has written about this work here and there is already a BBC News app for connected TVs which I wrote about here and here when it launched.

At its peak, Ceefax had an audience of some 20 million viewers a week, and as the end of the service has approached, it has received several thousand letters and emails of thanks from viewers.

In a tribute to the clarity of Ceefax’s simple, concise format and news stories, and to mark Ceefax's last day, the Plain English Campaign - which campaigns for clear, concise language in public information - has given Ceefax a lifetime achievement award.

It's an honour to have received so many tributes from Ceefax viewers, and to get this award, and both are a recognition of the skill and dedication of all the journalists who have worked on the service over the years, and the care they have taken in writing every story.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

Earlier this year we launched a new version of the BBC News mobile site, making it easier and quicker to use. This week we've begun the process of directing all mobile users automatically to that site. This means that anyone who visits BBC News on their mobile will be taken to the version of the site best suited to the type of phone they are using.

Many of you already visit the mobile site regularly but, up until now, people looking for BBC News on their phone will often have found themselves on the desktop version of the site, which is designed for desktop PCs, macs and laptops - all with much bigger screens. If you are using this desktop version on your phone it can be awkward to pinch, zoom and scan the stories on a small mobile screen.

This image shows how the mobile site displays on a smartphone - compared with the desktop version:

 

To tackle this, we've been working over the past six months to improve and add to the mobile site, taking on board your feedback about how you'd like to see it develop.

We've recently added video clips for iPhone and Android users, and made it easier to navigate the site. (We hope to extend this video service to other types of mobile in the future.) We've also added easier ways of getting to local news and weather services, something many of you asked for. You can read more about those changes here.

So, we're confident that the mobile site now has the wide range of content you are looking for and that it offers a better experience on a small screen than the desktop site, which is why we are taking the step of automatically redirecting mobile users there.

Of course, you may be happy to keep visiting the desktop site on your mobile and if you want to continue doing so just scroll to the bottom of the page and tap on the link for the desktop site. Your choice will be remembered for the next time you visit.

Similarly, if you use a mobile and find that you're not redirected to the new site, you can scroll to the bottom of the page and select the mobile site.

This is the latest stage in the ongoing work by our News product team on responsive design - a way of presenting our content to you in the most suitable way by detecting the type of device you are using and displaying the format best adapted for it. We are doing similar work to optimise the site for tablet users too.

The number of people coming to BBC News on mobile continues to grow. In an average week, 13.3m users worldwide use their mobile or tablet to visit the BBC News site and apps - around one-third of total users to BBC News Online.

If you are one of them, our aim is to offer you the full range and depth of BBC News content, whatever device you are using, whilst also making best use of the screen size.

We hope you'll like using the new mobile site, and if you'd like to leave comments and feedback about it, or have questions, please post them below. Or you can tweet your views using the hashtags #bbcnews #responsive

Update: Thanks for your comments. Here are some answers to the questions posted below:

John Walsh – Kindle: As a tablet device, albeit with a smaller screen than some makes, Kindles currently default to the desktop site. Users of any device including Kindles are certainly free to use the mobile version if they prefer by clicking the link at the bottom of the screen. Our aim is to further improve the experience for progressively larger screen sizes over time.

Jesse Moore - HTC: We know there are some devices that are incorrectly classified by our systems, often due to the fact that some devices have different identifiers dependent on the mobile network they are on. In any case we will certainly be doing everything we can to correct errors and ensure the redirection behaves as it should. In the meantime, please use the “Mobile Site” link at the foot of the page should you wish to use the mobile site – the selection will be remembered as long as cookies are not cleared. At this time the redirect only applies to the BBC Homepage and the News site.

Cogito Ergo Sum - Windows phone: This change applies to the browser experience, which is already designed to work for Windows Phone although at present we are unable to provide video for those devices.

Costmeabob - We take accessibility for our services seriously so, for example, our browser and applications are designed to work with Voiceover on iOS. 

Tim Stey - If you do still prefer the desktop version you can select the link at the bottom of the page and you’ll be taken to it. Your choice will be remembered next time you visit the site. We are working on enhancing the mobile site still further to include more content where the technology allows it - but with navigation more suited to a smaller screen size. 

 Josh Tumath - This blog post might be of interest, about our overall approach to responsive design published in March by Chris Russell, head of product for BBC News Online.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

If you're a developer or technologist keen to spend 10 months in one of the best newsrooms in the world, the 2012/13 Knight Mozilla Fellowships are now accepting applications until 11 August.

Here's senior product manager Andrew Leimdorfer with more details about the scheme:

It's a pretty exciting time to be involved in the cross-over between technology and journalism at the BBC.

There's the move to the heart of London's West End. New Broadcasting House, with its state-of-the-art Newsroom will be home to 6,500 employees by early 2013. There are new platforms to focus on as the audience using hand-held devices grows and grows. There are new ways of working with data, and a great opportunity to start working more closely with television graphics in our newly created visual journalism unit. Then there are all the emerging technologies for building news apps.

Want to get involved? Turns out you can.

The BBC News Specials team has been hosting a Knight-Mozilla fellow since the beginning of this year. Laurian Gridinoc has been in and out of our newsroom since January, helping us build our election results maps back in April, and, this month, helping us work out how we might develop new storytelling formats using video.

In the meantime, he's also been busy hacking away with the other 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla fellows. He attended SXSW in Texas, the Eyeo festival in Minneapolis, spent two days in Florence hacking TOR before going to Dundee for the OpenNews Datalive hackdays, then back to London for the Guardian's Discovery week and the BBC's News Labs.

If this combination of working on news content for a massive audience, and attending hack events that will put you in touch with some of the most creative people in the industry sounds appealing, then there's just a few weeks left to apply for the 2012-13 fellowship.

The deadline is August 11. You could end up at BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, Boston Globe, Der Spiegel, Zeit Online, lanacion.com or Pro Publica.

For more information visit the Mozilla Open News Site.

UPDATE Thursday 12 July 13:36 BST

The problem with the "Most popular" module has been fixed.

But, as you may have seen, there was also a major problem for BBC Online overall, with the whole site unavailable for a period of time on Wednesday evening. Richard Cooper, of BBC Future Media, explains more fully here.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010 and soon spread to other regions

In its executive summary the report says: "The great new challenge of the 'Arab Spring', as a media phenomenon, has been the explosion of 'user generated content' (UGC) combined with the need to rely on this because direct access to the story is so often denied or impeded.

"On the whole the BBC handled this well, drawing on its impressive reserves of regional expertise in the Arabic section and the Monitoring service."

The report also says the BBC "made efforts to alert listeners and viewers when such material could not be definitely authenticated, but this should perhaps be done on a more systematic basis."

And a summary of the report's conclusions recommends that "the BBC should consider how it might better share more effectively with the audience the rigorous vetting process to which all user-generated content (UGC) is subjected."

In light of this, it's worth mentioning, for anyone interested in knowing more about how this process of checking UGC material happens, that there's a good explanation here from one of the team working in the "UGC Hub" in the newsroom.

When we have done all we can to check but still cannot be 100% sure, we will sometimes still decide to use the material, whilst making these doubts clear, and the Trust is now asking us to be more consistent in the way we signpost and caveat this type of content. In those rare cases where we do get something wrong, we acknowledge and correct it as soon as we can.

It is significant that the Trust report recognises so clearly the great importance of UGC for our journalism.

We will continue to do everything we can to make best use of the accounts of people caught up in the stories themselves (such as this video, Syria activist: Homs situation 'so bad' and Egypt's Tahrir Square protesters tell their stories), making clear the origins of the material, as well as the first-hand reporting of our own correspondents.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

The BBC periodically reviews all its services, looking at whether they still deliver value for money, whether they are available on platforms our users can easily access and whether they continue to meet the changing needs of audiences.

For the Red Button video Multiscreen service in particular we also have to consider how it fits with the development of next-generation interactive TV (for example our new BBC News service on Connected TVs) as this starts to become more widely available.

A recent review, undertaken as part of a BBC strategy and consultation process called Delivering Quality First recommended changes to our existing Red Button services, specifically "a phased reduction of broadcast Red Button services, reducing the number of interactive streams to one across all platforms and exploring the longer-term transition to IPTV technologies".

As a result, we will soon be closing the remaining BBC News Multiscreen video service. The date scheduled for this is 20 June. Currently the service is still available to Sky and Virgin Media consumers - a Freeview version closed in October 2009.

A comprehensive News, Sport and Weather text service will continue to be offered via the Red Button, and other BBC News content will of course still be available on the Sky and Virgin Platforms, for example on the BBC News channel. And the BBC's News, Sport and Weather video content is obviously also available online.

Removing a service is always a difficult decision, but at the same time we are investing resources in brand new internet-connected TV services which we believe will allow us to offer far more than we've been able to before via Red Button, with more choice, more content, delivered in more appealing formats. More on these new developments before too long.

Update 15:25 BST, 26 June: The Red Button News Multiscreen video loops have now been closed, but if you are using Red Button you'll still get the full text service, which you can use in conjunction with the BBC News Channel. As I explained above, this decision was taken because we are now investing in a new internet-connected TV service which will, in effect, be the next generation of Red Button. Here are some answers to the questions posted below:

Craig - Facebook's an important platform and we have a page here but no current plans to integrate this into Red Button.

Skywatchman - there's a text version of the paper review which we publish every morning on the website which might be useful for you. The latest one is here and you can always find it by putting Newspaper review into the BBC News search engine.

Cping500, Aspiemum, David Godfrey and Skywatchman - the number of people with internet-connected TVs is indeed still small, but growing steadily, as manufacturers increasingly ship them as standard.

Sunny Isle of Wight - you should be able to watch BBC News video on iPad - clips do now work on the site, the News Channel stream works if you download the BBC News App, and you can also watch bulletins via iPlayer.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

One of the effects of this is that they will no longer have access to Ceefax, which is broadcast via the analogue signal.

Although we won't be saying our proper goodbyes to Ceefax until later in the year when switchover is complete across the country (viewers in Northern Ireland, for instance, will still be able to see it until October), I wanted to send a note of reassurance and a reminder: our digital text service, available via the red button to people who use cable, satellite or Freeview, provides national, local and international news, plus sport, weather and much else besides.

And it is still produced by the editorial team which has long provided Ceefax and the BBC News website.

UPDATE 20 April 11:25 BST

Q Reading your article I immediately want to scream out NOT TRUE! For those of us who use their Tivo service, when we press the red button all we get is iPlayer, hence missing a lot of content. I am assured that by the time the Olympics come around we will have access to Red Button content; I am not holding my breath given Virgin's history of delivering late.

A As of last week, we now offer a Red Button BBC News service on Tivo. It's a full-screen experience that also offers on-demand video, so not an exact replacement for Ceefax, but we hope it offers an innovative and useful way to keep up with the News.

Q The digital equivalent of Ceefax is far inferior mainly due to the fact that you have to watch telly on the screen along with the text - there is no way of switching the telly screen part off. I find that infuriating! Please, Beeb, can you fix this?

A The Red Button service is designed to allow viewers to read content while keeping in touch with what is on the TV channel they were watching. We do not currently offer any means to turn the TV off in the background - apologies to those who find this annoying.

Q The beauty of Ceefax was you could quickly take it in while watching a programme. With Red Button it takes you away from the programmes for a very long time, and this seems a backward step. With smartphones I can access more information quickly without having to switch off the show I'm watching, which makes it look like the Red Button service is almost obsolete before it's barely begun.

A It's true that in many ways smartphones offer a handy way to consume information while watching TV, and it would not be sensible for us to develop Red Button services in a way that simply tries to replicate this. With the design of the new News IPTV service, we are offering a service which prioritises video on-demand over text (though you can get both). We'd be interested to know people's feedback on this approach.

Q I did write about this to the BBC but have had no reply. Last week during the second test there was no run-by-run coverage as there was on page 341. Why is this? If it is as good as Ceefax, why are they not carrying this page? There would never be an issue of live footy scores being carried.


A I'm afraid I don't know the answer to this, but have passed on the question to colleagues at BBC Sport.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

There's more on today's launch, and on a brand new BBC Sport app for connected TVs too, in this blog post by Aaron Scullion, Executive Product Manager in BBC Future Media.

 

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.