From the poignant to the peculiar, the Web reacts to bin Laden

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From videos of heartfelt reflections and jubilant celebrations to the sarcastic, irreverent and just plain bizarre, the death of Osama bin Laden was Item No. 1 on the Internet Monday.

 

News of the al Qaeda leader's death sent Web traffic soaring Sunday night, as people searched for details of the raid that killed him.

 

By Monday, they were ready to have their say.

 

YouTube was reporting that multiple videos related to the raid were trending on Monday.

 

Some were recent videos of celebrations, like one of U.S. Naval Academy commandant Robert E. Clark II addressing jubilant midshipmen and leading them in a modified version of the academy's "I Believe" chant. (Note: it contains some adult language.)

 

And there was the one from Ground Zero, where crowds chanted and sang the National Anthem.

 

On the YouTube Trends page, Kevin Alloca reported that "osama bin laden dead" was, perhaps not surprisingly, the hottest trending search on the site late Sunday and early Monday.

 

Searches for videos of a handful of pro-USA songs also spiked, Alloca wrote. Among them: "God Bless America," Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." and Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue."

 

Video of former President George W. Bush's "bullhorn speech" from ground zero after the 9/11 attacks also was a trending search topic on Sunday night.

 

A YouTube spokeswoman said a "trending" video is one that is increasing in views quickly, is generating conversation on blogs and social media sites or is part of an influx of videos related to a single topic.

 

Photos related to the raid also were making the viral rounds. One of the first of the day, unfortunately, was a fake that supposedly was an image of bin Laden's body.

 

Getting lots of sharing on Sunday night was a New York Times photograph of firefighters in Times Square watching a news bulletin announcing bin Laden's death. The photo is of members of Ladder Company 4, which lost seven members on 9/11, according to a Times photo blog.

 

Less serious, and perhaps more politically pointed, was a humorous photo of President Barack Obama getting lots of traction on Twitter and Facebook.

 

The text on the photo, which shows Obama smiling and looking confident, reads: "Sorry it took so long to get you a copy of my birth certificate. I was too busy killing Osama bin Laden."

 

Some savvy Google Maps users didn't take long to find the northern-Pakistan compound where bin Laden was discovered and mark it as such.

 

Not long afterward, users began "reviewing" the compound as they would a restaurant or hotel.

 

"A great place to get together with your Navy buddies to shoot the breeze (or anything else that moves)," wrote one "reviewer."

 

"You mean all this time all we had to do was enter 'Osama Bin Laden's Hideout Compound' into Google Maps and we would have found him?" wrote another.

 

It wouldn't be the Internet without some strange offerings. And seekers of the bizarre often can't do any better than checking in with the folks at Next Media Animation TV.

 

The Taiwanese outfit found online fame with its outlandish animated "re-enactments" of news events like the Tiger Woods wreck and (debunked) reports that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was stopped at a Japanese airport with ninja throwing stars.

 

They, of course, couldn't pass on bin Laden. Their typically over-the-top video of the raid shows bin Laden being shot at point-blank range with machine guns, shotguns, rocket-propelled grenades and (of course) lasers. The clip then gets the jump on other media outlets by depicting bin Laden in Hell, where, let's just say, things don't go his way.

 

The Onion, the incisive fake-news site, appeared to have taken its first tentative shots at bin Laden on Monday afternoon. One photo was accompanied by the headline, "Violent Death of Human Being Terrific News For Once."

 

There was also a photo gallery on the satire site, one with a title best not repeated here.

 

As is often the case with big news events, scammers were quick to exploit bin Laden's death to launch malware on Facebook, in Web searches and elsewhere online.

 

"Sadly, there will be no shortage of scams taking advantage of this historic global news," Michael Sutton, of Web security company Zscaler,wrote in a blog post that highlighted several of the sites. "Users should use caution any time a site claims to be offering video or photos related to this news."

 

source: cnn