AJAX, once a fancy schmancy buzz-word that was going to revolutionize hwo interactivity was handled on the web, is now a major part of the modern webscape. And while it brings many needed facelifts to the old girl it also has a tendency to break one of the most basic tools for browsing the web – the 'back' button. Clicking it on pages that asynchronously fetch new data and inject them into pages can have some more or less annoying results (depending on the mood of the user). Not only can he/she end up on a unintended page, it also makes the dynamically loaded content go bye-bye when the user tries to navigate forward to the same page again. A good example of this would be pages that add more content as the user scrolls down a page. Going back and then forward would on a normal page render you back at the same place in the page but will in the AJAX case force the user to scroll through all the content again.1
One simply way to at least alleviate the problem with the back button (if not the problem with scrolling) is by adding breadcrumbs to a page. You've all seen them, they are more or less an ubiquitous part of multi-stage forms. They can be everything from something like this:
Blog >> Post >> Hello World
...too as fancy as you could possibly imagine (though keeping a usability feature usable can still be recommended).
While breadcrumbs have been criticized when used in a browser for duplicating the browsers back-button this is no longer an issue when the back button doesn't do what it once used to. If you are concerned about this then generating (or just showing) breadcrumbs with javascript will degrade gracefully, personally I don't find breadcrumbs a bad thing even on non AJAX pages as it gives a spatial sense of where on a website I am currently located.
Conclusion
Breaking the browsing paradigm can be a bad thing, if you let it, so just remember that while flash is all nice and good, it's more important to keep a site usable. Breadcrumbs can be one of these feature, especially on client-generated pages.
And on another note
There's actually one more benefit to be gained from using breadcrumbs – SEO (Or search engine optimization for you acronym handicapped people). Since they provide a straightforward way for a web-crawler to navigate from the deeper parts of your page back up to higher levels for further Crawling
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