Welcome, beta testers, and congratulations. You are one of the first members and visitors of pinay.com since we are so new.

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 for letters of “FiliPINO” and has a little bit of history but today the terms “pinoy” and “pinay” are used to refer to Filipino men and women in their motherland and everywhere else on Mother Earth.

Pinay.com is in beta version, and we’re just starting out. As a Pinay.com member you can help build a site for and by Filipinas. With Filipina members from around the world, this site that will represent an effort by Filipinas to share the myriad aspects of who we are.

If you’re here to find a penpal, a boyfriend/girlfriend or future spouse, then you have come to the wrong place! There are other sites out there for that and I want to be clear that this site has objectives beyond that. If you have come here to fulfill romantic goals you will have to fulfill those goals elsewhere then. Please review our Terms of Service. Also read 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 shared links of our websites and other favorite ones is just the beginning here in the beta stage.

Pinay.com empowers Pinays to create an online 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? A lot of them were not very useful to the overall 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). So 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, who knows if my earlier efforts helped or not but with the growth of the Internet and with the content creation by more Filipino men and women, today the online image of “Filipina” and “pinay” has begun to change. I am quite proud of intentional sites like FilipinaImages and online efforts like Pinay Scandal to help change the Filipina cybertyping that was going on. So this is a shout out to those publishers—-way to go, people!

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?

Pinay.com is one of those few domains that get 74% its of 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 a stranger’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.” At the time, Filipina.com was already being used as a mail-order-bride service. 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 beta member you will be able to access features so far and post content to help create a website for and by Filipinas.

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