Response

I think that the "ideas" of Web 2.0 mean well, but in reality they may be a little too dangerous. Allowing anyone and everyone to create or view what they want on the web is obviously going to be risky because not all people are going to make things that are appropriate, or are going to be honest about what they have made.

Things like dashboard views make some things just a little over the top. Who really cares if a site has had a billion hits? It probably isnt even statistically correct since a lot of people click on it and realize it wasn't what they were looking for and just press the back button. How can you count that as a hit when the person didnt even view the page in its entirity?

Also things like tagging give away TOO much information. Say on facebook someone gets an embarrassing picture of you while you were passed out drunk and you don't even know about it, then while you are recovering in bed for the next 48 hours they tag it to your facebook and hundreds of people see it without your permission first? Is that considered fair? Not in my opinion. In order for tagging to work, there must first be confirmation from the person as opposed to just the opportunity afterwards to untag it.

These are just a few examples, but in conclusion, my point would be that no, not all "associative trails" are valuable (nor fair) to all users.