greetings
Hello and welcome to my blog BagongPinay or NewFilipina.com. ‘Musta na? Maayo gid tani. (how are you? Fabulous, I hope).
I started publishing newfilipina.com in 1998. “15 years?” you ask. OMG, oh my gulay, YES IT IS! It was the first big filipina site on the world wide web way back when… And it was really fabulous. Filipinas were so happy to find a site for and by Filipinas.
“And how old is this silver-streaked Pinay?” you wonder as you glance at my pic. Well, I was 35 when I started newfilipina.com—so you do the math. 😉
Soooo, newfilipina.com has evolved over all these years.
- 1998 – newfilipina.com was THE first website for and by Filipinas (really!). It was a comprehensive community site that had discussion boards, art, poetry, features and columns by a handful of other fabulous Filipinas, and this site managed to give a wide Filipina audience, around the world, a pioneering, ground-breaking site that was inspiring and very different from all the other sites out there during that era (mail-order=bride sites and, ugh, sex tours sites).
- 2006 – newfilipina.com evolved into my personal blog because I started a new Filipina community site at Pinay.com.
- 2013 – newfilipina.com gets a big design refresh. I’ve added new great quote graphics to pretty things up and to go with some really, terrific new content. AND I finally figured that I should share all of my other blogs and websites (a conference, a new organization, several different blogs on Philippine culture and tradition) that I’ve worked on or been a part of since newfilipina.com took off all those years ago. Come to think of it, newfilipina.com started it all!
So i hope you get a chance to check out this blog and to view all my other works online via the above menu.
So how did I get started with newfilipina.com and all these blogs and sites? Well at the top of this page I mention that back in 1998 and the early 2000’s, Filipinas were very happy to find newfilipina.com. I’m not exaggerating. Really, because back then it was a time when most other web content creators were male and the internet audience was also mostly male, so many sites during those early days were published and targeted to males… the result was that almost all websites about Filipinas, I found during the early years of the world wide web, were mail-order-bride, sex-tours and porn sites. Here’s the intro I wrote for “Creating NewFilipina.com and the Rise of Cyberpinays,” in the pinay power anthology:
…i began using the internet in 1991. in 1995, having lived away from the philippines for [9 years], i began to check out the web and to use it to reconnect with my roots. this is when i found www.filipina.com, a web site whosehomepage title was “mail-order-brides from the philippines.” i was stunned and upset…then hoping to find better websites [with features written by filipinas about filipinas at home and abroad], i did a yahoo! search for the word filipina but became further disheartened when i found numerous site results that were just the same thing—filipinas looking for foreign pen pals, friends, and husbands.my dismay grew into horror when i also found many explicit websites about philippine bar girls, sex tours, and pornography. i was miserable at how these sites used filipina within their domain names…’—excerpt from “creating newfilipina.com and the rise of cyberpinays,” by perlaparedes daly in pinay power, edited by melinda de jesus.
(or its just all an illusion of my ego-based self)….
More details about me here at my bio page.