Day before yesterday on Jan 8th, Access to IMDb.com was blocked in China, adding the movie business Internet portal to a fast-growing list of banned Web sites featuring user-generated content, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And fresh reports have started coming that since yesterday, Chinese authorities have begun blocking Chinese internet users from reading Wired.com. Really, weird (wired)! Isn’t it?

While IMDb.com, fully named the Internet Movie Database, is owned by online bookselling giant Amazon.com, and claims over 57 million monthly visitors, Wired.com is the online affiliate of Wired magazine and ranks among top 1000 sites in Alexa. The block adds IMDB.com and Wired.com to a long list of sites that are or have been considered too dangerous for Chinese net users.

Current blacklist members and alumni include popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, the BBC, Wikipedia and even Google. China’s censorship of the net is in constant flux, aided by sets of powerful firewalls marketed to the Communist government by Western technology companies. While it is Ridiculous and hopefully China will someday learn from these mistakes, lets just hope they don’t try to censor the entire world first.

However, I think Thats ok. Let them prevent a billion people from accessing Wikipedia. It hurts me not in the slightest. Let them prevent a billion people from accessing everything. Can you imagine how much more difficult it will be to grow an educated population without the basic internet sites? Silly people. And its a waste of time anyway. These filters keep honest people honest. Anybody in China can use a proxy server to access these sites anyway. Many websites and personal blogs were banned since 2008. Some of these sites are excellent technical places or resource exchange platforms. What a pity.

At the end of the day, I feel that it is GOOD for you IMDB and Wired! Anybody who earns a black-out from the Chinese censors goes up a notch in my estimation (as long as they don’t pull their punches in the future as a result). I would be least surprised if tomorrow China decides to block TechChunks.com as a result of this particular article. But who cares? Would you care, if tomorrow you find your blog being black-listed in China?