Only in the UK

Where else in the world would a major media corporation ask its own readers to help it with research and reporting?

Help Us Trawl the Sarah Palin Emails

At 9am Alaskan time (1pm ET, 6pm BST) on 10 June, a two-and-a-half-year effort by a number of US news organisations will finally bear fruit when officials in the state capital, Juneau, release to the media thousands of emails sent and received by Sarah Palin while governor in 2007 and 2008.

The handover will fire the starting gun on a new race to find the stories, insights and funny bits hidden in more than 24,000 pages of documents.

Our US crack correspondents Ewen MacAskill and Ed Pilkington will be holed up in a Juneau hotel room combing through thousands of Palin emails as fast as they can read, while Richard Adams in Washington will be live-blogging whatever they – and our US colleagues – find here.

But given the size of the cache, we reckon the collective eyes of thousands of you will find the juicy bits more quickly, so we'll be publishing the raw mails on our website as quickly as we can and asking you to tell us which ones are interesting and why.

They'll be pretty rough and ready – no headlines or details of what they're about – but we hope you'll help us by using our simple system to tag them according to what subjects they cover, and how interesting they are.

We'd love it if you'd alert our editors, via a button on each email, or Tweet us at @gdnpalin, about any emails that you think our reporters should be examining. Remember that each numbered document represents a single page, so you have to click to previous and subsequent pages to see a full email. Now, as Ms Palin once exhorted: "Drill, baby, drill!"

To be honest, I don't know what I think about this. On the one hand, it seems like a cool way to encourage reader participation. On the other hand, Sarah Palin's emails are a really trivial thing to trawl. Who the hell cares? I would be far more likely to give this idea a big thumbs up if the Guardian was making available their cache of WikiLeak documents and asking readers to trawl through them!