As you would expect, some are questioning the timing of the films release, as it hits theaters less than a month before the presidential election. A message board poster at IMDB even compared the movie with Hitler-esque propaganda.

Do you think the Bin Laden / Seal Team 6 movie should be released before the election? Tell us what you think.

It does appear that Sony Pictures, the company distributing the film, is trying help Obama’s re-election bid, as they hosted a fundraiser for the President back in April. At the time of this writing, Sony is the only major studio to hold a political fundraiser this campaign season, according to The Weekly Standard.

Douglas Urbanski, a Hollywood producer and conservative radio talk show, calls the release date “very, very deliberate.” It should be noted that Urbanski was a producer for The Contender, a 2000 political film that sympathizes with a sex scandal-plagued Democrat and demonizes a conservative Republican member of Congress. That film was released October 13, 2000, only a mere month of way from the presidential election. Urbanski tells TWS, “It was without a doubt a deliberate attempt to influence the election“.

So it appears that Hollywood trying to sway voters just before an election is nothing new, so why is the Bin Laden / Seal Team 6 movie such a big deal?

Maureen Dowd, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times – Sunday Review, shares her thoughts on the films release date:

“The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.

It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.”

Earlier today, Representative Peter T. King, who is also chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called for an investigation into the White House’s cooperation with Hollywood filmmakers over the film. Essentially he wants to know what the Obama administration divulged about the raid, while helping the screenwriter do his research.

White House spokesman Jay Carney was quick to respond to King’s investigation requests, calling them “ridiculous“, he went on to say, “I would hope that as we face the continued threat from terrorism, the House Committee on Homeland Security would have more important topics to discuss than a movie.”

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal of the project released the following statement, disputing King’s comments as well:

“Our upcoming film project about the decade long pursuit of Bin Laden has been in the works for many years and integrates the collective efforts of three administrations, including those of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, as well as the cooperative strategies and implementation by the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, the dangerous work of finding the world’s most wanted man was carried out by individuals in the military and intelligence communities who put their lives at risk for the greater good without regard for political affiliation. This was an American triumph, both heroic and non-partisan, and there is no basis to suggest that our film will represent this enormous victory otherwise.”

News of the films release has people tweeting, as always.

Some Twitterers are taking a comedic negative stance toward the movie and its release date.

As Bigelow said in her statement, this project is nothing new, it’s been in development for quite some time. But, I think we’re all in agreement that Sony is trying to give Obama a little surge right before the election.

Currently IMDB has the movie listed as “Untitled International Thriller”, and features no other information on the project.

What are your thoughts on the movie and its scheduled release? Leave us a comment.

The account, @alemarahweb, is linked to the official website of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.  The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was the name of the ruling powers of the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 when they took control of Kabul and 90% of the country.  This regime was famous for their harsh treatment of women and the Shia minority in Afghanistan.  The Taliban became synonymous with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda following 9/11.

So yeah, that Taliban is now active in the world of social media.

The account in question has been around for s few months now, but it just tweeted its first English tweet late yesterday.  The Guardian first reported the account and their shift to English:

Their Twitter feed, @alemarahweb, pumps out several messages a day, keeping 993 followers up to date with often highly exaggerated reports of strikes against the “infidel forces” and the “Karzai puppet regime”. Most messages are in Pashtu, with links to news stories on the elaborate and multilingual website of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban’s shadow government likes to style itself.

Today, the feed broke into English for the first time, with a tweet about an attack on police in Farah province.

The above tweet takes the form of most of the English language tweets (about 8 in total) put out by the Taliban.  They are usually death reports and refer to the U.S. as “invaders.”  The reports range from ground troop deaths to helicopters shot down to US tanks being “obliterated.”

When the Guardian reported on the account last night it had just under 1,000 followers.  At the writing of this article it has 2,814 followers.  The account is following only 12 other accounts, including an Afghani carpet weaving group and a children’s mini-circus based in Kabul.  Strangley enough the Taliban’s account also follows a USAF logistics readiness officer currently deployed in Afghanistan.  How’s that phrase go?  Keep your friends close but follow your enemies on Twitter?

The Taliban’s embrace of technology seems a little odd, considering that they declared the internet as “wrong” and “against Islam” before banning it back in 2001.  But, let’s remember, we thought Osama bin Laden was still holed up in a cave somewhere before we found him in a million dollar compound.  And as far as technology goes, we collected a treasure trove of information from his computers and drives that we are still in the process of sorting through.

Actually Google News was “born in the aftermath” of the tragedy, as Google News Founder and Head Krishna Bharat points out. “At Google we realized that our ability to display links to the freshest and most relevant news was limited by a fundamental problem: fresh news lacked hyperlinks,” Bharat says. “Google’s ranking depended on links from other authors on the web. Fresh news, by definition, was too fresh to accumulate such links. A new importance signal was needed.”

“We have certainly come a long way in the last decade,” he says. “Indeed, Google News now has over 70 editions in over 30 languages, and sends over 1 billion clicks a month to news publishers worldwide. Additionally, 1 out of 6 web searches on Google includes a set of news results, which are computed with the help of Storyrank. This helps bring coverage of the most important news story matching the query to the top of the ranking.”

“In the last 10 years there has been a lot of learning, iteration, and innovation in our team. And most importantly, we have acquired a loyal audience of news enthusiasts, who appreciate diversity and the ability to access multiple points of view on a story.”

The diversity of multiple points of view is an important point, particularly considering the ongoing debate of news-for-pageviews, brought up again this week. MG Siegler of TechCrunch took to his personal blog to call Mashable “pathetic” for writing so many bin Laden stories he deemed to be purely for SEO. Read our take here. His larger point, of course was about not only Mashable, but the news industry as a whole, and perhaps even more so about the tech news industry, considering the title of the post was “On Bin Laden Killlng Tech Blogging.”

Bharat provides a download of a list of 150,000 links from the last five days, which may point to what Siegler is talking about, but Google paints the image in a much more positive light. Look at all of these different points of view. The beauty is that news consumers have the ability to choose which sources they want.

Google of course provides Google Trends, showing the hot search items of any given moment – a clear blueprint for what to write about if you want to try and capitalize on some quick search traffic (the keyword there being “try”). On Monday, bin Laden-related queries made up Google’s entire top 20 list at times. Yahoo also shared some search data.

As multiple sources (and common sense) have indicated, bin Laden news has indeed driven massive amounts of traffic to news sites.

According to the firm’s data (and this is North America), Yahoo News ranked first among the News and Media sties on Monday, experiencing a 200% increase in total visits, compared to the previous Monday. MSNBC, the Huffington Post, CNN.com, and ABCNews.com rounded out the top five.

“The search terms driving traffic to the News & Media category on Monday, May 2, 2011 were dominated by content surrounding the Bin Laden death, although it is interesting to note the ‘bin laden wives’ ranked first followed by ‘osama bin laden dead’,” said Hitwise Director of Research Heather Dougherty. “Out of the top 100 search terms, 30 were Bin Laden related, with 6 of those search queries including the term ‘photo’ or video’ as some called for additional evidence. Interest also grew for news around the Navy Seal Team 6, the secret unit involved in the operation and the mansion where it took place.”

On Monday, as we reported, Osama-related queries dominated Google’s entire top 20 list of hot search trends. Yahoo also shared some search data about the news. Here is the list of top search terms driving traffic to news and media sites on Monday, according to Experian Hitwise:

comScore has also shared some interesting data related to the news. “Here at comScore, we were curious to understand how others may have experienced this news, so we decided to do a little digging,” said comScore’s Andrew Lipsman. “Our analysis looks at the 24-hour period beginning at 7:00 PM ET on Sunday, May 1, and ending at 7:00 PM ET Monday, May 2.”

Here’s the firm’s look at news consumption by platform:

Very interesting to see how big a lead computer had over mobile at all times. They also look at hourly percentage of news traffic by digital media platform (that is OSL-related) and hourly share of Osama-related news traffic by digital media platform here. These show where each platform had their spikes in usage.

“The quest for news about Osama bin Laden exhibited in these charts illustrates how increasingly dependent on technology we’ve become to keep informed of developments especially as they pertain to important breaking news,” said Lipsman. “Mobile and tablet devices are becoming a more significant part of the digital media landscape, as it’s becoming clearer how they help fill in the gaps when consumers may not always be right by a computer. From our analysis of news consumption in recent days, we’ve shown that many people opted for these devices – myself included – to feed our need for news in the wake of this historic event. This behavior is only going to grow more prevalent with time with the plethora of devices coming out to support growing information needs. And in this real-time environment where we can always be plugged in, one can expect news consumers will only become savvier in consuming a constant stream of news from multiple platforms. The capture and killing of Osama bin Laden may have just given us an important glimpse into the future of news consumption.”

The fact that people are consuming news in so many formats, only adds to the argument for expanded coverage by publications who are increasingly using more channels to attract their audiences. To put this in context with the Mashable debate, user who is already looking at Mashable, or a Facebook update from Mashable as they’re browsing their newsfeed, might get important information quicker, or at least become aware of the general story than they otherwise would have.

Since then, he has become an instant sensation, a hero for the unwitting citizen journalist if you will, as well as an example of the news value of social media like Twitter. The instant fame looks to be taxing on Athar, as instant fame is to anyone:

But he seems good natured about it all in an interview with CNET. In this interview he discusses the night of Bin Laden’s death as well as the aftermath – for him and for Pakistan. He says that he has at least 120 unread interview requests in his inbox just from one day, but he talked to CNET because of how helpful download.com has been to him in the past.

Athar weighs in on the debate that is heating up in America – whether the White House should release the Bin Laden death photos. He disagrees with President Obama:

Yes, definitely. The world deserves to see it. An “Osama II: The Return of Osama”-type scenario will always be in the back of their minds otherwise.

His commentary on U.S. – Afghani foreign policy paints a pretty bleak picture on how lack of info and transparency can lead to the engendering of radical thoughts:

Since I moved to Abbottabad, I have tried to reduce the number of things that I should be concerned about and have tried to focus on things that I can actually change. I can’t change the U.S. Afghan policy (or the AfPak policy as they are now preferring), so I spend more brain cycles thinking about how I can help my immediate environment. In Pakistan, the only information we get is X people killed by drone, out of which Y are assumed to be terrorists. That is not good enough for public approval of the U.S. policies here in Pakistan.

Us Pakistanis are kept in the dark by both Pakistan and the U.S. regarding the true picture, so most of us resort to agreeing to one conspiracy theory or another–which helps the terrorists’ causes.

He also discusses how he and the Pakistani people feel about the U.S. operation that happened on their soil:

Regarding the event itself, there is still confusion regarding whether or not the Pakistani authorities assisted in this particular operation–which is the main point that has been bothering the Pakistani people. If this was done by approval of the Pakistani Army, and if the Pakistani sovereignty was not violated, then most of the average Pakistani people would probably be more relaxed. Had it been someone else besides Osama, they’d be just as agitated to hear of an unauthorized attack by a foreign force.

Some more tidbits from the interview: He confirmed that he has gotten marriage proposals via Twitter, and says that he has room for three more wives. When asked if he was joking, he says only halfway. He can only take one more.

He also states that as far as he knows, he is the first person in Pakistan to surpass 100,000 Twitter followers. As the writing of this article, he has amassed just over 105,000.

He moved to Abbottabad from the more urban city of Lahore, partially due to the weather. Abbottabad is a popular tourist location because of its temperate climate. Other reasons he moved include less power failures (although that has changed since Sunday), cleaner air and less traffic.

Sohaib Athar’s unlikely rise to fame can be used to make a lot of morals to a lot of stories. I believe that the most important one is that everyone really is a reporter. Everything you record might be something huge, and with the permeation of social media now happening worldwide, the chances of Athar’s instant rise to fame repeating itself for some other unknowing micro-blogger are very, very good.

According to the report, we won’t have to wait until Sunday to see this segment of the interview, as it is scheduled to air on CBS Evening News tonight. (coincidentally, 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley was just named as Katie Couric’s replacement on the program).

Obama is quoted as saying:

“The risks of release outweigh the benefits. Conspiracy theorists around the world will just claim the photos are doctored anyway, and there is a real risk that releasing the photos will only serve to inflame public opinion in the Middle East.”

“Imagine how the American people would react if Al Qaida killed one of our troops or military leaders, and put photos of the body on the internet. Osama bin Laden is not a trophy – he is dead and let’s now focus on continuing the fight until Al Qaida has been eliminated.”

According to a recent CNN poll, 56% want to see the photos released. Did the president make the right call?

Meanwhile, fake death photos continue to circulate.

The image of President Obama, Veep Joe Biden, Secretary of State Clinton and other VIPS as they “receive an update on the mission against Osama Bin Laden” has already been discussed to the point of exhaustion by careful, scrutinizing eyes. Since the photo was released, we have learned that the Navy SEAL team that performed the operation wore head cams, and the White House watched live stream of the mission. Could this photo-moment be the exact moment where they were watching it go down? Hillary Clinton’s reaction sure suggests that something interesting was happening on the screen.

And then there are the other observations. Why isn’t General Marshall Webb looking? What could possibly be on that document that the White House felt the need to obscure? All the coffee cups have official seals? Awesome!

Anyways, this image is now part of the national consciousness, and now there are some stats to prove it. TechCrunch has received some figures about the photo from Flickr. The photo was posted at 10am PDT – check out the exponential rate of views:

390,000 views at 3:30pm (5.5 hours later at 71,000 views per hour),
 600,000 at 5pm (7 hours later at 140,000 views/hour) and 
1,400,000 at 11am today (25 hours later at 44,000 views/hour). The White House Flickr account averages 100K views per day, and yesterday it received 2.5 million views, and as of 7pm today it already had 3.6 million views an order of magnitude greater than normal.

As of right now, the photo has over 1.64 million views on Flickr. The most viewed photo currently is a 5-year-old photo of Nohkalikai Falls, Cherrapunjee. It has just under 3 million views. 5 years to get 3 million against 2 days to get 1 and a half million? Yeah, it’s looking likely that the “situation room” pic will steal the crown as most viewed pretty soon.

As mememakers are already having a field day with the death of Bin Laden, the “situation room” pic is, of course, its own meme – prompting the best work of those mememakers across the interwebs. The first one to emerge shows Jersey Shore’s “The Situation” standing behind Obama in the “situation room.” I refuse to show that one, as it really does go too far. *Shudder*

These, on the other hand, are winners:

“Situation Room” photo via White House Flickr stream.

Whether malicious or innocent, people unfortunately mixed up Obama and Osama during the coverage of the latter’s death in a Pakistani compound. I, for one, can see how you could mix up the names. They are only one letter off after all.

News Manager at YouTube Olivia Ma just tweeted the link to a video that the Washington Post has provided. It serves a round-up of the name-mix-up FAILS of the night. Funny, awkward and painful…it’s exactly what an end of the day YouTube video should be.

Check it out:

We might find out in the coming weeks. The Navy SEALs who carried out the mission that resulted in the death of Bin Laden left the Pakistani compound with more than a body. According to Politco, the SEALs were able to recover hard drives, CDs, and flash drives from the raid that U.S. officials are calling “the motherlode of intelligence.”

Currently, the data is being combed through by hundreds of people at a secret location in Afghanistan. Everyone in Washington is understandably excited to see what kind of information, if any, is usable. “It’s going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable,” officials said to Politico.

The first thought has to be about the contents. Exactly what kind of information could be on these drives? It has been reported that Bin Laden’s compound lacked phone lines or internet in order to keep a lower profile – so it’s hard to guess the contents.

About 5 years ago it was famously unearthed that Osama Bin Laden had a soft spot for some aspects of American pop culture. A woman named Kola Boof wrote a tell-all book where she claimed to be a former sex slave/ girlfriend of Bin Laden. In the book, she detailed the Al Qaeda leader’s obsession with Whitney Houston among other things such as The Wonder Years.

I guess it’s possible that all they could find is the finale to The Wonder Years, you know, the one in the barn where Winnie…ah I can’t talk about it. Talk about depressing on multiple levels.

But hopefully something of use can be taken from the drives, some sort of data that can be used effectively.

The second thought has to be about encryption. Gizmodo has an interesting take on accessing the data:

We don’t know if “the mother lode of intelligence”—as that official called it—in the hard drives and memory sticks is encrypted or not. Given Osama’s level of confidence—the circumstances appear to indicate that he was very comfortable and felt very secure in his lair—the idea of some of the data not being encrypted is not that crazy.

But even if it is, the US intelligence agencies have the necessary computing power and the expertise to crack the information open, even if the terrorists are using the AES-256 standard. You can be sure that, if there are any encrypted files, they are now being processed by supercomputers at CIA’s headquarters. The only question is how fast they can access the information. That’s the critical part: the fastest they get it, the more actionable that information would be, leading to the fast capture or killing of other leaders and operatives in the al Qaeda network.

Yesterday, video and photos surfaced from the raid of the inside of the compound. The graphic images were of blood-spattered rooms in total disarray. Today, we await the possible release of photos of Bin Laden’s body. The White House is currently debating the pros and cons of that action.

Check out his recent tweets:

Interesting.

Since athletes saying controversial stuff on Twitter is now the norm, organizations must release quick statements whenever an athlete gets a little too post-happy. Steelers President Art Rooney said this, posted on steelers.com:

I have not spoken with Rashard so it is hard to explain or even comprehend what he meant with his recent Twitter comments. The entire Steelers’ organization is very proud of the job our military personnel have done and we can only hope this leads to our troops coming home soon.

Mendenhall is already a trending topic on Twitter, and is the recipient of some pretty declaratory tweets, rolling in bunches by the second:

Mendenhall hasn’t tweeted in the last 17 hours.