Check out this absolutely excellent use of AJAX

[Code Monkey]

I consider that a horrible missuse of AJAX. It's doing the same thing as the dreadful AJAX chat script does. Polling the server every 5000 ms. That would bring a lot of sites down. If they have the server power then that's fine. But it is still not what ajax is designed to do. You could do the same thing with php and a header refresh.