Slideshare have a right-hand column area for presentations where they show statistics on a specific presentation and background information on the presentation. This information is probably of much less importance to the user when compared to the actual content of the presentation but I’ve always found it pretty interesting information. It’s like when iTunes tell you that you have 280 songs in your library, which is 1.7GB’s worth of music, and 20.1 hours of music. Seriously, who’s going to care how long playing ALL your music in your library, back-to-back, will take? Not many people, but it’s one of those ‘oh that’s interesting’ nuggets of information that just adds value to the page and, I think, adds a bit more kudos to your site. It’s like having a friend who knows a bit about everything, in that alot of what they say isn’t of immediate importance but it’s interesting / amusing / entertaining / educational.

I often push for this kind of information, where available and relevant. Sometimes it’s information that users wouldn’t need (which makes it an ‘interesting’ bit of info) or it may be something that the user does want to know (in which case you’ve already worked it out for them).