About

• Who are you?
• Why “The Standard”?
• What’s your political ‘angle’?
• Why don’t you say who you are?
• Who pays for this?
• Are you getting rich from blogging?
• Why don’t you post more often/more regularly etc?
• Where is/was The Standard?
• I have an idea/comment/suggestion, how can I contact you?
• No – you must….

Who are you?

We’ve a collective who saw a gap in the New Zealand political blogosphere and decided that we should have a go at filling it here at The Standard blog site. We write here in our personal capacities and the opinions that are expressed on the blog are individual unless expressly stated otherwise (see the policy). We do not write on behalf of any organization. Legally this website is owned by The Standard Trust, an entity set up by the authors to own The Standard’s url and handle any advertising revenue.

Why “The Standard”?

The Standard newspaper – from where our masthead comes – was founded by labour movement activists in the 1930s. They used it as a vehicle to share their views with a broader audience – a perspective they felt the mainstream media was representing poorly. We think the same is true today.

What’s your political ‘angle’?

We come from a variety of backgrounds and our political views don’t always match up but it’d be fair to say that all of us share a commitment to the values and principles that underpin the broad labour movement and we hope that perspective will come through strongly as you read the blog.

Why don’t you say who you are?

Some of the authors here use their real names, but others choose to blog anonymously for a variety of reasons. Some of us have professional reasons for doing so, others of us are reluctant to expose ourselves to the kind of personal threats sometimes made online. Those of us using pseudonyms discussed this issue long and hard before we began and came down on the side of anonymity. We hope you can see why. You might also want to contemplate the implications of this link.

If you want to get hold of us, have a look on the Contact Page.

Who pays for this?

We do, but in the spirit of a collective endeavour we get help from time to time from a range of people from the labour movement whose technical skills we couldn’t do without. Thanks guys!

The sysop has paid for the server as part of his contribution to the site and has done so since the site was started in August 2007 on his home server. If you want to contribute towards the costs of running the server, he finally got around to getting a paypal account to pay for the latest server host. With the launch of The Standard v.3.0 we are hoping to start covering our costs through advertising revenue, but any donations are more than welcome.

Are you getting rich from blogging?

Nope. We don’t make any money out of blogging here, and until recently we didn’t even run ads. We do this purely because we enjoy it and we think the labour movement side of the story is always worth telling. Our initial aim is for advertising revenue to cover the costs of running the site. Any revenue beyond that will be used to develop the site and further the progressive left principles The Standard was founded on.

Why don’t you post more often/more regularly etc?

None of us are full-time bloggers. We have jobs and families and other interests, one or two of us even have girlfriends/boyfriends. We hope you like reading our blog site but we try not to let it run our lives. If you have an idea for a post we’re happy for you to let us know though.

The number of posts has been steadily increasing as get better at writing posts rapidly, we find more authors, and as we accept more guest posts mostly from commentors.

Over time we have had a number of posters join and leave the authoring crew as their circumstances and time commitments allow.  If you want to try a post or two as a guest poster then send them to Contribute Post. If they are readable, then they will often get posted. If you are any good, then you might get given a login if enough current moderators don’t disagree.

Where is/was The Standard?

It is on the net somewhere. Exactly where is a mystery even to the sysop. At present it is located on a server either in New York or Texas. It was recently moved from Utah because Bluehost didn’t like the CPU usage.

Its original inception was on a home windows server in Newton Auckland. The site grew so rapidly it has been hosted on a variety of systems to cope with the increasing traffic and CPU demands. The site has been hosted on a variety of activist systems where space was available in late 2007 and early 2008.

Notably for a period of three weeks in Janurary 2008  it was hosted on donated space on a activists  system. This was some system space donated by an ISP to the NZ Labour party, which had given control to a literate activist to support left-leaning sites. This short period has since provided considerable excitement by our local conspiracy nutters who prefer not to use their brains.

In Feburary 2008 it was moved to a NZ hosting site where it managed to survive the 2008 election campaign with aa number of increases in capacity. The site moved offshore in April 2009 because the offshore hosting costs are considerably cheaper than in NZ. This was required because the increasing traffic and CPU usage were straining the sysops budget. It has since moved to yet another server to cope with increasing traffic loads.

Having an offshore site also reduces exposure to any legal issues. For instance with the owners of the National parties political spinners Crosby/Textor who have a habit of using defamation suits to stifle discussion of their techniques. This is an unwelcome trend in the NZ political sphere.

I have an idea/comment/suggestion, how can I contact you?

Send us an email: We can’t reply to everything and, as above, sometimes have other priorities but we do appreciate hearing from you.

No – you must….

Have you read this page? We must do nothing. The posters post on the topics they want to (with a few limitations from the sysop). If you really absolutely want your ideas to be heard, then start a blog and start learning to write. You can probably find a more compatible blog on our blogroll. Or you can comment on the posts that our posters write and follow our rather lenient rules.