Our first (visible) post was on the 15th of August 2007 from all_your_base appropriately enough it was asking John Key to explain his fuzzy thinking – but he is still doing it. His ideas still seem to depend on the focus group results. It is interesting to see the range of topics we were writing about in August 2007.
Despite our various vicissitudes and trauma of some server moves and the loss of some graphics during a server failure, you can still see all of our 5933 posts in the archives of the last 1100 days and 190,446 approved comments. That is a pretty good for a largely political site. The quality, despite some unevenness at various times, is pretty high – and always very opinionated.
There have been thirty people who have author rights at some time or another and have written at least a few posts. Some of them have found it isn’t to their taste (writing coherent and concise posts is a bit of an artform). Others have shifted their time to other parts of their lives.
However we maintain all our authors logins as active in the hopes that they will come back and write for us again someday. Others of us wax and wane in our posting depending on what our lives are doing and what interest we have in the topics of the day. Looking back to August 2007 I see that all_your_base, John A, IrishBill, and Eddie were actively writing posts then, and still do today. I was there in 2007 but getting the system setup and later trying to make sure it didn’t fall over…
These days we have a number of people outside of the author group writing as guest posters (in fact half of the posts today), providing us with ‘original’ graphics, or just telling us what they think we’re doing right or wrong using the e-mail back-channel.
About a twentieth of the daily readers actually comment on the site. But those who do make up for it with a raucous range of political and often humorous opinion. It is obviously a source of amusement to the silent majority. They keep popping back very frequently to some posts frequently to see what is going on, usually the ones with a higher quality of comments rather than those with excessive comments. The difference between the number of comments per post and the number of page views is often pretty striking.
I think I can say that The Standard has grown into a real community project of those on the left and around the labour movement. That was the dream of the small group that set the site up. Of course we have been helped by the generous assistance of those on the right torturing our ideas and sparking some of the more interesting arguments. We don’t exactly agree most of the time even on the left and even the authors don’t see eye to eye frequently. But that is half of the fun.
This is a place where most people come to argue and agree to disagree in a approximation of peace and moderation (or there is moderation… :twisted:). Long may it continue……
BTW: Where are the other posts that were promised for this auspicious occasion?
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