By: Samantha Freeman-Atwood

A little over a week ago, Mark Evans posted a blog entitled “Should Dead 2.0 be outed?” Mark was writing about Nik Cubrilovic who, apparently through some heavy sleuthing, discovered the identity of the ever popular anonymous blogger “skeptic,” who posts on Dead 2.0 (which, ironically, is now a dead link).

There's now a lot of speculation as to what happened to the site - which is now password protected.

The question is, who really cares about the identity of Dead 2.0? Will it actually have any effect on your life if you found out who Dead 2.0 is? And if we do find out the name of the blog in question, won’t it shroud our minds with preconceived notions of him that would take away from the content of the blog?

This harkens back to our need to categorize everything so as to better understand it. If something doesn’t have a name and therefore fit in to a category, then it can’t be understood (and hence judged), based on the inherent or assigned qualities that make it fit into the category in the first place (a good friend of mine always gets great responses when she tells people she’s an embalmer).

There are people every day on the web who fool others with their made up identities. How about the scanners and spammers? They pose as someone they would rather be, or someone who they want you think they are and do a lot more damage than Dead 2.0. Skeptic’s secret identity is a secret for a reason, so that he can express ideas without the judgments that come with knowing who he is, knowing where he works, lives and plays.

Are we not more than our names, more than what we do, where we live, and the people we’re married to? I’m with Nik when it comes to not divulging Dead 2.0’s name because thus far, his postings have been harmless intellectual and cynical rantings.

Last I checked the Dead 2.0 poll had an overwhelming 64 percent NO vote in response to his question, “Does who I am really matter?” Obviously I’m not alone in thinking that liberal speech doesn’t have to come with an identity tag.

Samantha Freeman-Atwood is an Assistant Consultant with Hill & Knowlton Canada's Technology Communications Practice. She joined the company in 2006.