You can't fail to have noticed the phone hacking scandal that's been all over the news the last two weeks.

In fact, it's been in the news for a few years now with the Guardian's Nick Davies first publishing his investigation in 2009. They have stayed with the story ever since despite claims from various parties that it was going nowhere. London Mayor Boris Johnson famously described the story as "codswallop" that "looks like a politically motivated put-up job by the Labour party".

It's a tricky thing to run ads about, partly because it's an incredibly fast moving story and partly because in a world of 24 hour communications, where this story leads the news every night, does it need ads?

To help raise awareness that it's a Guardian story and to encourage readers to stay with the story, we've been running digital escalator panels at 18 sites across London all week. We're updating them twice a day, in the morning they show the main headline and the front page of the newspaper and in the afternoon they're updated with a relevant tweet from Guardian news.

The Guardian's full coverage of the phone hacking story can be found here.

Almost as powerful and influential as News International, but not in an evil way: the Brand Republic Top 200 list of the best advertising, marketing, media, PR and digital blogs from around the world, ranked in terms of traffic and social influence. In with a bullet at number 32, as it happens, the King of Blogs, yes, pop-pickers, it's your very own Welcome to Optimism.

W+K's Iain Tait's blog Crack Unit is up there at number 23.

How could this useless repository for pictures of W+K people's fashion missteps and 'middle class raps' be so influential? According to Brandwatch, who helped compile the list:

"The 200 was a pre-selected list chosen by Brand Republic. In other words, the rankings do not mean the 200 blogs are necessarily the top 200 across the whole web. It’s a tough job to get a list like this together; Brand Republic used both desktop research and crowd-sourced recommendations from Twitter to compile this first version…

Once the list of 200 was complete, we ranked the sites.

As you may have seen from reading the host page of the BR200, our formula included metrics such as site traffic and MozRank and data from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The algorithm we use for this is evolving and is relatively complex. Where it differs from other methods of blog-ranking is its encompassing of the social presence of those involved with the blog.

So, while metrics pertaining purely to the blog itself (such as site traffic, sites linking in etc) were taken into account, we also included analysis of the authors on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Taking into account the social element like this meant that scores were boosted the more linked up the blog was with the authors’ various social profiles."