It seems as if China is blocking Twitter as well as Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. Other blocked sites is WordPress.com, YouTube, Flickr, Hotmail and several others. Ryan McLaughlin blogs from China and thinks the block is due to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4.

I can only predict the next few days will see more and more sites being blocked, hopefully with things returning to normal shortly after (though if past blocks are anything to go by, it could be weeks or months).

Hat tip: Mashable

Happy Monday, folks! We’ve only got a couple of things to tell you about this week, but I think you’ll find them both very useful.

First, Dan Wolfgang has updated his Hot Date plugin to work with Movable Type 4.25. I’ve been using Hot Date since its original release and I love it. It makes updating the timestamp on an entry very easy. This really comes in handy on those entries that take several days to complete — click a single button, and your entry date is updated to the current date and time.

Next, Beau Smith has a trick for manually ordering categories. His method will allow you to customize the order in which categories are output for things like menu listings. I’ve done similar tricks in the past, but his solution is far simpler and more elegant than mine. Thanks, Beau!

What have you done with Movable Type this week? Let us know in the comments.

Actress Mia Farrow would like to draw attention to Darfur. She started her hunger strike 10 days ago and is regularly updating her blog and YouTube channel to keep all of us updated.

She urges everyone to call the White House at 202-456-1111 and remind President Barack Obama of his promise to help in ending the tragedy in Darfur..

“People want to go home. They want to go back to their villages to rebuild. They want peace and security. They haven’t had that for two long. We can all do something. We have a voice. if we don’t use it now then who are we?” Farrow said in a video post.

Magician David Blaine called on Farrow before she started with the hunger strike and gave tips on how to prepare and what to expect.

“He said after 6 days I wont feel hunger. He told me to drink 4 liters of water,” she said.

Video browsers in general, and bloggers in particular, should know that China has blocked YouTube. The Reuters report tells us that the ban has been in place over the past 24 hours, and the reason is supposedly unknown. However, Committee to Protect Bloggers posted this:

Xinhua, the Chinese news agency reported that the government blocked access to the site after a fabricated video showing C hinese police brutally beating up Tibetans during the riots last year. The description of the offending video fits one that was posted by the Tibetan government in exile and is a collage of varios clips showing the police putting down the riots brutally.

This is not the first time YouTube is banned in China. Several other countries have bans in effect as well. More on Techmeme.

This is actually pretty cool, and could be the one killer feature that would make me swap to IntenseDebate. As you probably know, IntenseDebate is a hosted comment manager for your site, just like Disqus.

And now they’ve added plugin support, with a bunch of them available already. Like instant YouTube embedding and Seesmic video commenting support. Check out the launch post, the ReadWriteWeb coverage, Techmeme coverage, and the intro video below:

The Facebook TOS debacle last week shined a rare light on the subject of rights we give away when we sign up to use site or service.

Though Facebook’s new TOS, which removed the clause that lets users end their license granted to Facebook by deleting their work, was both of poor judgment and very worrisome, it was likely much ado about. Not only was the TOS rescinded shortly after the controversy began, but even with the new TOS, Facebook’s rights were still limited by the user’s privacy settings.

What has gotten significantly less attention is the sheer number of TOS’ that most Web users sign just as part of being on the Web. In an age where almost every site is also a “service”, it seems we’re creating more accounts than ever and, with every sign up, signing away more and more of our rights.

Most of us have lost track of all the sites we have registered for, the agreements we have signed and few of us actually take the time to even skim the terms that we do accept. Our rights to our online lives are in millions of pieces, scattered across countless companies and sites.

Piecing them back together, if it became necessary, could be nearly impossible. Worse still, as many of these companies continue to expand and grow the rights they give themselves via their TOS,

It has come time to question our love affair for new services and the terms they force us to agree to and seek ways to streamline and simplify this very messy process. read more

Showtime, an US pay cable network that is also available in other parts of the world via satellite, utilizes the internet to launch a new TV series, called The United States of Tara. According to UPI.com, the first episode will be aired for free on sites like TV.com, Yahoo and Blockbuster.com, but also on blogs like Gawker, and social networking sites like Facebook. You’ll even be able to catch it in your mobile phone if you’ve got the necessary services from AT&T or Verizon. Read more about the series over at the Showtime site. The premiere is on January 18th.

My bet is that we’ll see more launches like this, especially using service like YouTube. It would be pretty easy to gain traction in the blogosphere if you played your cards right, so don’t be surprised when PR reps from TV companies start emailing you…

Last year on this site, I wrote a series of articles about important copyright cases that could seriously impact blogging and the Internet at large. All in all there were five such cases, each with the ability to drastically change how bloggers and other Web publishers operated.

Now that more than a year has passed since the original articles, it seems like a good time to go back and see what has happened with those cases where, they sit right now and where they are likely heading. read more

For at least some sites and some bloggers, the holiday season has already begun on a rather depressing note. Sites that have posted prices or information from Wal-Mart’s upcoming “Black Friday” advertisements have already been threatened. At least one site, SearchAllDeals, has received a DMCA Takedown Notice regarding it.

Even though the copyright element of the claim is questionable, especially considering that you can not copyright facts, including prices, it is clear that the holidays can introduce a new set of copyright hazards for bloggers and other Webmasters.

So, as we rapidly approach the holiday season, here are five of the biggest copyright hazards that you may need to watch out for as you celebrate the season online. read more

Afrigator (love the name!) has compiled some statistics on the current state of the African blogosphere, and it makes for some interesting reading.

Plenty of numbers to digest, with the full presentation available here, but here are some key figures of interest:

In Africa as a whole, the number of blog posts indexed by Afrigator leapt from just under 69,000 to over 115,000. In South Africa, posts more than doubled, from around 77,000 to over 164,000.

South Africa dominates the African blog space, with nearly three in every five blogs attributable to the country. Other identifiable countries include Kenya (8%), Nigeria (5.5%), and Tanzania (~2%). read more