I have looked into this myself but unfortunately with followers not being in the api it's not as easy to get. I assume you can just do some web scraping but when I looked at that it seemed scary and thus I haven't tried put something together yet.
Yeah, unfortunately you can only use what's returned in the JSON string, so aside from hit counts, that only leaves the tags I believe.
Turns out not as hard as I thought, just wrote some code that may not be good but it does work. Other than the hole "technical and security measures that prevent grabbing data from sites that aren't your own". So if we had a magic alternative link like the original hit counter it probably could be done.
Voodoo? Who do?
You do