Mathemagenic

More pragmatic questions: what site statistics could you recommend to use with a weblog?

I'm most interested to know the following about my weblog:

• history of referers and tracking changes (quantitative, for the rest there is Technorati :)
• search strings and their change over time
• most popular visited pages (I have some insight about popular linked pages from Blogdex)
• RSS requests/traffic vs. pages requests/traffic
• visitors that are RSS readers (this comes down to knowing how many people are subscribed to your RSS)

It's also interesting to know usual things (e.g. hits and visitors), but as far as I don't have ads it's not important :)

See also: RSS Flow, Measured

My brother is very pragmatic young person, so after I had explained him how my weblog works he said that I should try to earn some money with it. This was never my goal (I thought only about reputation :), but his suggestion made me thinking. I may go for a couple of "ad" things that bring some money to cover my hosting if they fit what I do. But I'm not sure if this "commercialisation" effort is worth it.

So, my questions for bloggers (A-list bloggers are not counted :)

• Do you have any experiences with partner programs (e.g. Amazon Associates)? Did they bring anything tangible?
• Have you tried "Donate" buttons (e.g. PayPal) to let people support your weblog? Any results?
• Do you have "wishlists" (e.g. Amazon wishlist) and are there many people sending presents to you?
• Have you tried advertisments (e.g. Google AdSense or BlogAds)? And what...?
• Something else?

Here I'm interested in direct use of your weblog for earning money. Cases of getting a job/project because of your on-line reputation or providing products/services are something else.

And finally - what do you think about these ways of earning money with your weblog? Would you do this? In what cases? Or would you prefer to have it pure without spoiling your design/reputation with money issues?

See also: comments, In Search Of Blog Business Models [via Marc Canter], How to make money from blogging - by acting as a miner and getting domain specific nuggets [via Roland Tanglao: KLogs], The Economist: Golden blogs  [via Blogads]