We're planning to (soft) launch WAG the Dog next week on the unsuspecting public. I am a little nervous about this. The WAGger is basically a proof-of-concept and a fun staging ground for developing new ideas. While Tech's user base may be able to roll with the punches of a less-than-stable system, I also don't want to put a bad taste in their mouths before the really useful features are introduced.

The WAG the Dog is basically two parts: the WAGger which parses the page you are looking at to see if there are things on there that could be localized (links that can be proxied, ISSNs, DOIs, etc.) and the (hopefully) soon-to-be-introduced "WAGnet" which takes what you're looking at and tries to find other useful and relevant items in the collection and present them to you. Currently, it takes the LCSH of whatever you're looking at (assuming there's anything to work with) and finds other electronic resources in the same subject heading, presents them, checks to see if they appear in a database, present it, etc.

Next week I hope to also have some sort of folksonomic linkage, as well, so if any of the resources appear, say, in del.icio.us or unalog, get the tags from there, and use those tags on sites like Connotea or CiteULike. The only problem here is that I have no idea if people are socially bookmarking homepages of scholarly content. I guess I'll find out.

Still, it will be interesting to see if the public finds WAG the Dog useful.