As noted by Danwei yesterday evening, and one or two other places, YouTube remains NoTube in China today. Heaven knows what I'll do if I can't get my daily dose of copyright infringing Stephen Colbert clips, "Chad Vader" and "Ask a Ninja". And I'm not being sarcastic. I really love all that amateur crap.

Annoyingly, the block also seems to catch YouTube videos embedded or skinned in Facebook.

Anyway, today I am stuck with either Chinese video sharing sites, which I find less edifying for linguistic reasons, or America's swathe of unblocked second-tier video sharing sites. Although Revver also appears to be blocked, most of the rest are business as usual. Of course, most of the rest put together make up about 10% market share, so blocking YouTube is pretty significant.

This may be either a Party Congress thing, or one of those temporary blockages that linger for a couple of days and then mysteriously evaporate. Or it could be a sign that YouTube and its fans in China are headed for the kind of long-term misery visited upon Blogspot and Wikipedia. Time will tell. It's probably best to avoid hysteria until a few days go by or we all start slipping into "Flight of the Conchords" withdrawal.

If it is a permanent block it will suck. The bandwidth and scripting requirements of streaming video break most of usual GFW workarounds. You can browse, but watching is for the moment a non-starter. Perhaps someone so inclined could come up with a CGI proxy tuned for video sharing?

Until then, you can amuse yourself by reading my prior speculation about just such a block from my old CNET Asia blog:

Chinese YouTubes courting controversy (July, 2006)
Is YouTube a time bomb for Google in China? (November, 2006)

Coming soon: The sanitized version of YouTube for China? Reps. Tom Lantos and Christoppher Smith, sharpen your knives!