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Dead 2.0 is a funny tech blog. The author posts anonymously under the name ‘Skeptic’, and enjoys deflating the hype around Web 2.0 startups with posts like ‘Funding the Web 2.0 gravy train‘ and ‘Secret to why you should invest in Dogster revealed…‘. One of his main targets has been Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch, the most prominent news source about these startups.

Now Nik Cubrilovic has discovered Skeptic’s identity, and so has Arrington. Apparently, he’s a VP at a prominent tech company that’s raised some serious funding.

Arrington’s understandably not happy about the Dead 2.0 ‘attack blog’, as he calls it. He writes, regarding the consequences of Skeptic’s possible unveiling:

Lanjut →

You know we’re in trouble when people start comparing the Web 2.0 trend to postmodernism. In my general experience, it’s a sure sign that the conversation is about to disappear up its own backside. However, praise is due to Dr Paddy Byers who very cleverly teased out some of the links in a piece he wrote last week.

Generally speaking, postmodernists deny the validity of claims to objectivity, the power of reason and what they call grand narratives. Grand Narratives are the stories we use to structure our lives. We also find the idea that the media creates our reality, that there’s no originality left, only copies of what there’s been before.

It’s a little bit flippant, but if that isn’t a description of much of the blogosphere, I don’t know what is. The idea that each of us can become a publisher. That every individual blogger’s thoughts have equal weight and validity. “We, the media”. And some postmodern ideas also seem an apt description of the continual annotation and comment on each other’s ideas - like this post. You might also think about things like digg and RSS - where the reader is also editor.

Lanjut →

Wondered about Yahoo! and China? Censored search results? Shopping journalists to a communist state machine?

Here’s what a company spokesperson told me:

"Yahoo! opposes the punishment of any person on the grounds of what may be called free speech. We firmly oppose that. However, we have to abide by the local laws of whatever country we operate in. If we did not, it could lead to the imprisonment of our own employees. These are legal demands. We don’t give out any information except to accredited legal authorities. Also, they don’t typically tell us what the information is for. They have a warrant and we have to comply."

So why operate in China, then, if it might lead to morally precarious actions?

"We believe that Chinese people are better off with Yahoo! than they would be otherwise. The benefits of having better access to the internet and the spread of knowledge that implies outweigh these concerns. But we have to obey the laws of the countries that we operate in."

So what legal obligations are you under in China?

"You’d have to ask Alibaba about that. They have operated Yahoo! China since 2005. We have policies about what we will do, but we don’t know the exact restrictions."

Satisfied? Sure you are…