Welcome, members and visitors of pinay.com!

What is “Pinay”? “Pinay” can be simply defined as “Filipina.” If you want to trace the origins of the term, it is the female version of “Pinoy,” which comes from the last four letters of “FiliPINO” and has a little bit of history of referring to the first overseas Filipino workers(OFWs) in the first half of the 20th century but today the terms “pinoy” and “pinay” are used to refer to Philippine people in the motherland and everywhere on Mother Earth.

As a Pinay.com member you can help build a site for and by Filipinas. With Filipina members from around the world, this site represents an effort by Filipinas to share the myriad aspects of who we are.

And no, this site is NOT a dating site. So if you’re here to find a penpal, a boyfriend/girlfriend or future spouse, then you have come to the wrong place! I want to be clear that if you have come here for romantic reasons then this is not the site for that, but Pinay.com has great stuff and links to pinay blogs, Philippine sites and other women and world topics that matter to Pinays everywhere. (See Terms of Service and Oops!)

We are all connected in pakikipagkapwa in the Cosmos and there will be many other levels of finding interconnections with each other in this site — overlapping interests such as good food and recipes, travel, wisdom, quotations, art, videos, photos, gatherings, family, justice, friends and many many stories—funny ones, sad ones, heartening ones, exhilarating ones… our individual blogs and links to Philippine sites and other favorites from Pinays everywhere are here for you to explore… and to share!

Because Pinay.com empowers all Pinays online to create an internet presence for and by Filipinas. This site is founded on the premise that Filipinas are more than the individual and sum total of what others expect of them or think of them or expect them to be. Pinay.com is dedicated to the belief that Filipinas can define themselves for themselves.

So, this is not another social network ala Facebook site. This is where Filipinas can share who they are with the world. People, especially fellow Filipinas, can read up on the site content and get many perspectives on the possibilities of who Filipinas are and who they themselves can become.

A Little History about Filipinas Online…
I’ve been using the Internet since the early 90s. Have you seen other sites about Filipinas back then? At the time they were all very narrowly targeted to men looking for “perfect” wives & Pinays looking for a better life. During those early days of the internet and world wide web Filipina.com was being used as a mail-order-bride service, the publisher of which had this i-don’t-care-if-you-hate-us-or-love-us page that mocked people who expressed their objections to the site being used that way. That and many more sites at that time worried and upset me because their domains used the word “filipina” in them but they all were’t very useful to the larger population of Filipinas—-they were quite one-dimensional and focused mostly on how men could connect with a mail-order-bride list or with a service that could get them to the Philippines to tour the red light district scenes (I won’t get into that here). Some research results are found at my 2008 blog post Filipina Cyberpresence ’95-03.

Thus I and some other Pinays started a site called BagongPinay/NewFilipina in 1998 to help counter the stereotyping those sites were creating and then in 2004 I started the Fabulous Filipina campaign to urge Filipina/o web publishers to help change this image online by using keywords in their metatags and the content of their site.

Well, with the content creation by more Filipino men and women, today the online image of “Filipina” and “pinay” has been changig little by little. I am quite proud of intentional sites and online efforts that started coming out later in the mid 2000s like FilipinaImages and Yan ang Pinay that also want to change the Filipina cybertyping that has been going on since the beginning days of the internet. So this is a shout out to those publishers—-way to go, people! There are not a lot of focused efforts out there and we need more. That is why being a Pinay.com member and being pro-active in sharing pinay links and writing a blog AND proudly calling it Pinay/Filipina is how you can help Pinay identity online too!

A Little History about Pinay.com…
I’ve been holding on to the domain name of Pinay.com since 1998 (in conjunction with newfilipina.com). Can you believe that since then several men have approached me to buy the domain name from me? A bid in 2008 was just under $20K! In order to pay that I have a hunch he would have had to use the domain to sell something. WHAT would any man be selling with that domain—-click throughs? Pictures? Names and addresses? Or worse—-girlie pictures and porn? Isn’t it yucky to think about that? So let’s change the topic right away…

Pinay.com is one of those few domains that get 75% of its visitors from direct traffic, meaning people simply type in “pinay” in the location field of their browser to visit us. And that has been the case since the 90s. The remainder of the traffic comes from search engines or referring sites. 75% direct traffic is the reason why men have been offering to buy this domain from me.

But I will not trust any strange man’s purpose for how they would use pinay.com online for. Filipinas shouldn’t be cubby-holed by what a non-Filipina or any ONE person would have to publish about us online and we most certainly aren’t for sale!

Pinay.com Onwards…
Pinay.com was a gift from Adrian, a Filipino Internet Service Provider based in San Francisco. He told me that he bought it to “save it from the wolves of the internet.” Adrian’s good intention was a gift to not just me but all of us Filipinas and our loved ones. So let’s use it well! It really is up to Filipinas, and nobody else to go about this and to share who we are online. So you too, if you’re a Filipina, can become a member, and share about yourself. Start writing about yourself by creating a blog… or if you already have a blog, then post your RSS feed and it will immediately show up in the blogs page. Share links of your own published sites and your favorite sites, but of course, we’re mostly looking for links to your favorite Pinay and Pinoy sites!

Expect more features and changes to the site in the months to come. As a pinay.com member you will be able to access features so far and post content to help create a website for and by Filipinas.

Fabulous Pinay.com members, you can gain power points every time you contribute to the site or interact with others. Power points ranking can gain you site privileges and prizes.

We’ll be adding other fun modules on various topics but because we’re operating on limited resources for now, this will take baby steps. Soon, with your membership and support, Pinay.com will be progressing and growing by leaps and bounds!

Let our intentions for this site be open-hearted and expansive and let them come from a place of Love and Kapwa.

Thanks for being part of this project!—-Perla Daly