Ten years ago if you had asked me if I would ever want to spend time at a site where millions of average people could upload their home videos, I would have sniffed in disdain. That is why, despite years spent toiling in the technology industry, I am still not a multimillionaire and spend most of my time anchored to a cubicle rather than shooting hoops on my superyacht, which is what I'd hoped for.

So it goes. We can't all be winners or we'd have no one to envy. And I've come around to the charms of video-sharing sites like YouTube, going so far as take my own first foray following my recent trip to Xinjiang. One of the best China blogs around, Danwei, regularly posts funny and well-produced video clips featuring the vast weirdness that is China. The Chinese, not to be left out of the fun, have also launched a couple of video-sharing sites of their own. Some of them might be headed for trouble.

It's not all innocent fun.

Of the two Chinese video-sharing sites I looked at recently, the one that looks like it's in for smoother sailing is Tudou.com. Tudou has secured itself some nifty financing and, importantly, seems to be managing itself in a way that won't annoy China's censors. In an interview in BusinessWeek a few months ago, founder Gary Wang said that regulation is light, but that the company uses internal censors to block pornography as well as material it feels the Government will find objectionable. This is the standard cost of doing business on the Web in China. (Another BusinessWeek article also discusses how the current wave of Chinese entrepreneurs is responding to China's Web controls.)

Sure enough, Tudou is pretty wholesome. It does suffer from the perennial bugaboo of Chinese Web sites: A fast-and-loose approach to intellectual property rights. You'll find a fair amount of stuff which would probably not pass YouTube's copyright muster (the opening 5 minutes of the Disney movie Lion King, for instance). There's also a lot of stuff lifted from television. But you won't find much to make you hustle your children out of the room. Unless, of course, you don't like Disney or Chinese pop groups.

But some of it is. Kinda.

Recent rival YoQoo has taken a different approach in its attempt to win viewers. It's relying more on old-fashioned sex appeal. A lot of this is in the form of uploads of harmlessly racy European television commercials, but on the day I surfed there was also some NSFW stuff that would provide good evidence for sexual assault prosecutions. While the Chinese authorities take a somewhat more permissive view to online titillation than most people would expect (both the China Daily, China's flagship English newspaper and Web site, and Xinhua, the state news service, are repeat softcore offenders). But the authorities do have their limits, and the regulatory winds here are prone to dangerously quick shifts.

Speaking of the China Daily, I don't generally have much time for it, thanks to its tireless adherence to the party line (in China that's not a metaphor), inconsistent copy editing and habit of poaching from some of the better China bloggers. But occasionally it does come up with an interesting story, including the one today that got me looking at Chinese video-sharing sites. In this article, YoQoo founder Victor Koo says:

"Most Chinese office workers open the Internet Explorer for news surfing when they arrive at the office in the morning," says Koo.

"I hope they go to Yoqoo to watch funny clips to relax themselves when they are ready to leave offices in the evening. That will be a new lifestyle."

I'm not sure it's the humor they'll be coming for.

But all this raises another question. What does the emergence of Chinese video-sharing sites mean for the future of YouTube in China? YouTube does monitor uploads for IPR violations and sexually explicit content (with mixed success) but it's probably not paying much attention to things that would annoy Chinese Government censors. While the Great Firewall traps YouTube searches for obvious hot buttons like FLG, a search for Tiananmen Square (which is permitted by the Great Firewall because of tourism) yields a first page of returns dedicated almost entirely to the incidents of 1989. Friends of mine have wondered out loud if YouTube is headed for the same kind of blanket block or heavy-duty filtering that currently afflicts Blogger, Google's international site and other information sources in the Chinese Government doghouse. The Chinese Government is not, by and large, a fan of unregulated user-generated content or search. In fairness, many of us have been wondering the same thing about Flickr for some time, but it's still accessible here.

And here is another interesting question: If YouTube was blocked, would it go down the same path as other US Internet providers and launch a China version that satisfied the censors?

To judge from the woes of the firms that have tried this, it would be a risky road to follow.