Tracking Who Followed Your Links

Scoble:

I would love it if my blog tool could tell me more about the things I link to. For instance, how much traffic did it send to that person? How many people linked to it after my link (that would tell me the viralness of an idea)? How many times have I linked to Graham? How does that compare to the number of times I’ve linked to Dori Smith or Dave Winer? What’s the reciprocity of a link? (Did Graham link back and continue the conversation?)

 Most website tracking software will tell you how many people followed a link from your site. How many other people link to it is moving into Technorati/PubSub/etc’s realm, as is the reciprocity count for links. How many times you’ve linked to various sites isn’t a stat I’ve seen before but could be added either directly to your blogging software or to your blog tracking software.

BlogBeat gives a very easy to use view of these kinds of statistics and Google Analytics provides a more in-depth but harder to understand view of them. It would be worth trying a few of these types of services out and seeing which you prefer. The main question though is why do you want to know these things? What do you plan to do with the information? If it’s just for interests sake the simple interface is probably the best, if you want to use that information to post more about what interests your readers, perhaps you need more in-depth stats and should also consider looking at what people read vs what they skip over or just skim.