Overseas blockades and booming videos

07/06/10 posted by Annie

The Chinese government has blocked access to Foursquare on the 21st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It's not the first time China has taken away internet services, in fact Google agreed to censor the incident in 2006 from Chinese search results, and over two months ago Google completely axed their search service, google.cn, throughout mainland China. Now, it seems the Chinese government is becoming more aware of social media usage, blocking Foursquare after protesters "checked in" to Tiananmen Square and left sensitive comments. Mashable expects the block to be lifted within a few days, but doubts it will be the last major act of censorship by the country.

Darting over to Turkey, there have been numerous reports of Turkish internet service providers blocking Google services including Google Docs, Groups, Translate, Sites, AppEngine, Code and Feedburner. Turkish blogs and Twitter feeds all tell the same story, with one source revealing emails have been sent out by ISPs to their customers which say legal reasons are behind the censorship. These blockades come after the very recent news of Facebook being banned in Bangladesh and Pakistan due to inappropriate images of the Prophet Muhammad. While it's still unclear which services are out of action - some reports are naming GoogleAnalytics and Mail, while others are saying Analytics is functioning very slowly - one thing is clear: the daily goings-on of businesses and individuals around the world who rely on Google's services will probably be negatively affected.

Now, on to the future. New research from the Pew Internet Project predicts that almost all American net surfers will be watching videos online in less than five years if the current rate of growth continues. Currently, the figure sits at 69 percent of American internet-users, and this includes both streamed and downloaded videos from YouTube, Hulu, DailyMotion and Vimeo. Back home, research released last year by Nielsen Online indicated over 4.2 million users a month are watching videos online, with more than 60 percent watching it while they watch TV. These are great stats if you've been thinking about Video SEO tactics to help boost your website in both Google's and user interests. However, if your audience is international, you might need alternative modes of marketing to politically sensitive nations which regularly block sites like YouTube and Last.fm.