Day: November 20, 2002

Eugene Volokh out that InstaGuy‘s traffic statistics are beginning to resemble those of established Big Media outlets:
INTERESTING STATISTIC: The Christian Science Monitor, a respected national newspaper, has circulation of 71,924.
This month, Instapundit — one guy with a Web page — has been averaging 60,000 unique visitors per day.
One quibble with Eugene’s characterization: using the phrase “unique visitors” is misleading, if not downright inaccurate.
What SiteMeter (which InstaPundit uses) tracks is unique visits. From their help page:
Site Meter defines a “visit” as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views.
The implication is that while it seems reasonable to assume that the Christian Science Monitor has at least 71,924 unique people receiving their publication it is not reasonable to assume that Glenn has 60,000 unique readers — because his stats likely represent a smaller number of people, some of which check his site many times a day.
Still very impressive, though, and yet another reminder that the line between ‘big’ and ‘small’ media is no longer a line — it’s a very grey, very wide smudge…

Glenn’s TechCentralStation column is up, returning to the “pack not a herd” meme which he explored earlier and I followed up on over at the Action Center. He hits many of the same points (he mentioned we were thinking along the same lines after my post), but does a better job at it, so check it out.
One brief followup though: Glenn touches on the subject of vigilantism (and the fear of it), arguing that good preparation will limit the instances of vigilantism in the event of a new attack.
This is exactly right. Providing structured training and information to citizens on how to react appropriately in a crisis is the best thing we can do to avoid vigilante action. Involving citizens doesn’t mean just handing everyone a gun and saying “go get ’em”: it means providing structured training in the skills that can be of use in the event of an attack (for the list, see Glenn’s TCS column).
It’s the difference between a bunch of guys with guns and a trained army: both are dangerous. But the trained soldiers are both far more effective at doing damage to the bad guys, and more effective at ensuring that they don’t injure anyone else in the process.
Today, without such training programs in place, citizens are on their own to figure out, in a violent terrorist situation, whether it’s the right thing to do to try to resist with force — or whether they should wait for the professionals to arrive. Providing information from law enforcement and military professionals to citizens on how to react in this kind of situation won’t encourage vigilantism or cowboy-like behavior: on the contrary, it will prevent it…