EVE New Citizens Q&A

you sir, are in an npc corporation.

The standings apply at all levels (alliance, corporation, and individual).

So in your first example, your alliance or corporation took the time to set standings at the alliance or corporation level, and you just automatically inherited those. It's basically the job of diplomatic officers / directors to configure the alliance / corp standings to reflect the current situation with who's an enemy and who's a friend.

In your "today" example, it sounds like they're completely clueless or lazy and haven't set any standings.

Either that, or there's a misconfiguration in your overview where it doesn't show you colors and ship tags properly. In which case, even after setting blues yourself, you still won't see them in the overview. So I'd check your overview first, make sure the color backgrounds, blinking, etc. have checkmarks in the boxes, and if everything looks ok in the overview, I'd ask if there are alliance-level standings, and say that they're not being displayed in your user interface for some reason.

It could be a bug, too.

EDIT: The only change I'm aware of is that CCP changed the standings configuration options from a numeric scale (set them to -10, -8, -5, ... +5, +10) to a threshold system (set them deep blue, blue, neutral, red, deep red). But as far as I know, they automatically converted everyone's existing numbers to colors when they pushed that patch out.

Regarding Overview settings this little helper has been very useful---> Klick me

Edit. The link doesn't work because it has some bad words in it, just google for "Un-Fock your Overview" but replace the "O" in Fock with an "u" before doing so. ;)