The consensus opinion on the cause of the now three-day-old YouTube block is probably still "Party Congress". We'll find out how valid that is in the next week or so, I suppose. Meanwhile, here are two more theories from a colleague of mine.

First, apparently the Dalai Lama's visit to the Capitol and Congressional Gold Medal was apparently "all over" YouTube. Perhaps, but there's always been a lot of Dalai Lama stuff on YouTube and it's never gone over the Nanny Threshold before. Many of the US visit clips seems to have been added after the block and none of them were exactly setting YouTube on fire. ("Dalai Lama's Address: Part 1": 208 views.) Still, there was a lot of pique over the "gold medal" in the Chinese government, so who knows.

Second, and perhaps more credibly, YouTube has just launched Taiwan and Hong Kong based Chinese versions:

YouTube aims to eventually launch localized sites "in every country, in every language," said YouTube's international manager, Sakina Arsiwala. She declined to give a timetable for future launches.

U.S.-based YouTube launched its first Chinese-language Web site in Hong Kong Wednesday, and recently launched local versions of the site in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the U.K.

Anyone want to start taking bets on YouTube China? It would be a gigawatt controversy electromagnet for Google. However, as a possible cause of the block I'd give YouTube Taiwan a bit more credence that the Dalai Lama theory, especially when combined with Party Congress hyper-sensitivity.

Or, as always, it could just be one of those random things.

 Hey, Dalai Lama, can you reincarnate YouTube for us? 

Note: Thanks to AB for the conspiracy theories and AP article on YouTube's international plans.

Update: As long as we're talking Dalai Lama tech conspiracies, I just noticed this Thompson Financial story on alleged hijackings of US search engines in China:

US Internet search engines in China were being hijacked and directed to Chinese-owned Baidu, analysts said Wednesday, speculating that this may be retaliation for the White House award to exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama.

Analysts at Search Engine Roundtable, a website focusing on Internet search, said Chinese users trying to search on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft websites were being directed to the Chinese search engine.

"It seems like China is fed up with the US, so as a way to fight back, they redirected virtually all search traffic from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to Baidu, the Chinese based search engine," the analysts wrote.

For the record, Imagethief has experienced no such disruptions to the Chinese sites of Yahoo or Google. This article also recycles the Dalai Lama - YouTube connection theory and various other bits of hysteria.