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The Guardian looks to the cloud to uncover MP expenses

Cloud reporting

18 June 2009 17:55 GMT / By Stuart Miles

While The Telegraph has probably uncovered all the juicy bits, UK newspaper, The Guardian, has come up with a novel way of wading through the 700,000 odd pages of documents detailing UK MPs expenses.

Rather than hire a crack team to sit their for hours, days, months, and possibly years, the paper has uploaded the whole lot to a shared document reader, a la Google Docs, and is letting Joe Public do the finding.

"Join us in digging through the 700,000 documents [we think this is meant to say pages] of MPs' expenses to identify individual claims, or documents that you think merit further investigation. You can work through your own MP's expenses, or just hit the button below to start reviewing", says the paper as if encouraging its readers to do this over the crossword.

So far the paper is claiming that of the 19,305 documents that have been viewed there is still a massive 10,104 to go.

It is not sure however whether anyone has found anything good enough to bring down yet another MP.

The Telegraph, who first broke the story, had 26 trained journalists at one point working on the story, but with so many documents The Guardian is hoping that they didn't find every shady dealing.