I currently use the statistics module (core) on my Drupal 6 install. This increments a count in the {node_counter} table every time the node is viewed, and this works.

My question is - can I programmatically increment this counter as well? I am looking to achieve this when users interact with content created from views (say click a lightbox), so being able to update the table with AJAX would be ideal.

I have done a quick search on d.o and there doesn't appear to be any modules that stick out straight away. Does anyone have any experience with this?