Opinions Wanted!

I'm thinking about adding a hit counter to this blog, to find out for sure if I have fifteen readers or only ten. And I also thought that there are probably other tools that can give me useless data to geek out about (I know I've seen charts and bar graphs somewhere!), which is always desirable.

So I wanted to ask those of you out there: do you have hit counters on your blogs? How did you get them, and how did you decide to go with one over another? (It looks like there are a bunch of sites that will do it for free, and I can't tell how they're different.) Anyone getting more detailed statistics? Is this something that can be done quickly and easily, or will it be some big, complicated project? And is it even worth it in the first place?

Hm. Checking Technorati, I see Antick Musings now has 36 links from 15 sites, and is ranked # 189,100. All of those numbers, I think, are substantially up from the last time I looked, and the links seem to be mostly Itzkoff-related. So I guess the conventional wisdom about the blog world is correct: the way to get a higher profile is to be against things as loudly as possible (and preferably in an entertaining manner, but that's optional). I wonder if there's anything I can take a loud -- but principled! -- stand against this week?