CHINA BLOCKS TWITTER, WORDPRESS, YOUTUBE, HOTMAIL etc.

One of my favorite sites, MASHABLE-The Social Media Guide, announced that of today, the Chinese authorities have blocked internet access to Twitter, Flickr (Flickr reviews), Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com and several other sites. Wordpress (WordPress reviews), YouTube (YouTube reviews), Blogger (blogger reviews) are also blocked.

According to early reports on Twitter (Twitter reviews) and on blogs it seems that the Chinese authorities want to quiet down the entire major social networking and social media part of the web ahead of the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen massacre on June 4th.

For advice and more information in this article written by Stan Schroeder, please CLICK HERE.

Can you imagine they also blocked RSS feeds too? Please read this fantastic article by Jacqui Cheng on how China's great firewall has turned its attention on RSS feeds.

Extracted from that article:

"As many readers who follow the antics of the Chinese government know, when it comes to enforcing the "Great Firewall of China," consistency isn't exactly its strong point. While certain phrases, concepts, and entire web sites are regularly blocked from reaching the eyeballs of many Chinese Internet surfers, things like high traffic are enough to let a number of forbidden concepts slip through. And then there's the indecision of China's Public Security Bureau (PSB), which has blocked certain sites (such as Blogspot and Wordpress blogs) on and off for some time now, and enforces the blocks inconsistently between provinces. For a One True China, there are certainly many interpretations of what is and isn't allowed through the country's cyber connection.

Savvy Internet fans in the people's republic have known for a long time, however, that there have been simple ways to get forbidden information. One of those ways was the magical gift of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. The Great Firewall can block specific web sites all it wants, but as long as there's an RSS feed, many Chinese surfers can use feeds to access otherwise forbidden information.

Unfortunately, China appears to have finally gotten wise to RSS as of late—reports have been popping up from our readers and around the web of not being able to access FeedBurner RSS feeds as early as August of this year. More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with "feeds," "rss," and "blog," thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites—including ones that aren't blocked in China, such as Ars Technica—useless.

So what is a feed-deprived Internet user in China to do? Well, there are a few workarounds, some of which may be simpler than others. Some of our readers in China tell us that web-based feed aggregators, such as NewsGator Online, (sort of) help provide access to RSS feeds."

For more, please CLICK HERE to read the rest of the article.

In another article written by Mark Hopkins at THIS LINK, China has also blocked CNN News too!! For more on that news, please CLICK HERE.

I am putting up this post because of the advice given and we better KIV these pointers just in case......if you can get my drift....