Covering the very best and tops of 2008 in the United States, here is the ultimate list for you:

Top Ten Box Office hitmakers (… and the dollar figures are just domestic grosses!)

1 The Dark Knight $530,896,852
2 Iron Man $318,313,199
3 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull $317,023,851
4 Hancock $227,946,274
5 WALL-E $223,783,432
6 Kung Fu Panda $215,434,591
7 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa $174,862,381
8 Twilight $167,325,198
9 Quantum of Solace $164,302,659
10 Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! $154,529,439

Source: Box Office Mojo as of December 30, 2008

Top Ten DVD Sales (with release dates)

1 Iron Man 9/30/08
2 I Am Legend 3/18/08
3 Alvin and the Chipmunks 4/1/08
4 Enchanted 3/18/08
5 National Treasure 2 : Book of Secrets 5/20/08
6 Wall-E 11/18/08
7 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 10/14/08
8 Sex and the City – The Movie 9/23/08
9 Bee Movie 3/11/08
10 American Gangster 2/19/08

Source: The Nielsen Company (January 1 – December 7, 2008)

I wonder about this list with Batman, The Dark Knight not making it into the Top 10 DVD sales considering it is the top grosser in theaters worldwide! I guess most people just watched it and not buy the DVD (like I did) whereas Iron Man people watched and bought the DVD (which I did too!).

Amazon.com The Best DVDs of 2008

1 Juno
2 The Dark Knight
3 Iron Man
4 John Adams (HBO Miniseries)
5 Mad Men Season One
6 Dexter Season Two
7 The Office Seson four
8 Sex and The City, the Movie
9 30 Rock Season Two
10 3:10 to Yuma

Source: amazon.com

Top 10 TV Programs (with TV network it is on)

1 AMERICAN IDOL-TUESDAY (performances) FOX
2 AMERICAN IDOL-WEDNESDAY (results night) FOX
3 DANCING WITH THE STARS (performances) ABC
4 DANCING W/STARS RESULTS (results night) ABC
5 MENTALIST, THE CBS
5 NBC SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL NBC
7 CSI CBS
8 NCIS CBS
9 60 MINUTES CBS
9 SURVIVOR: GABON CBS

Source: The Nielsen Company, as of December 7, 2008

Most Popular songs on next page…

- 0 -

Sixth Step: Paying attention to site statistics

I wasn’t. I only started doing it concurrently upon joining Entrecard sometime in June 2008. I wasn’t even checking my Adsense account until recently! A mistake on my part and one which newbies should take into consideration when blogging. You should pay attention to your statistics! They can give you important points as to what your visitors are reading, what they’re searching, how they got to your site and where they come from. It is very interesting. Though different sites give varying tracking information and results, it is more or less consistent and close to each other. Google analytics, e-referrer.com, histats.com, feedburner.com, feedjit.com are all great tools and must haves to study your stats.

I just installed e-referrer stats on July 27and it already tracked 3,961 visits. 1,674 of that came from Google searches! At the same time I installed flagcounter that shows 2200 US visits since July 27. I didn’t even realize I get an average of 100-150 visits a day according to the trackers. I would have been happy with 10 visits a day! Topblogs.com tracking Philippine sites says I’ve had close to 11,000 page views since June 15- the day I joined! I have a PageRank of 2 and my feedburner says I have 40-50 readers on average.

Alexa ranking is wonderful as well, when I checked my site a while back it was in the 1 million ranking. I saw it shrink in number since then! Right now it says, I’m ranked at 188,988!! 230,000! According to Alexa, 64% of my users come from the US. Makes sense since I’m in the US, what I couldn’t believe is that the Philippines isn’t on my TOP 5 users!! How did that happen? I’ve always thought most of my readers come from the Philippines. Here I am wrong again.

I mentioned about the “Sinigang” keyword and how I appear on that search. That’s not even the BEST part when I reiterate how important content is. By paying attention to my site stats I was able to see that majority of my traffic wasn’t coming from other bloggers or all these networking sites at all! Except for entrecard which comes second in my referrer list, I get the most traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN searches! How cool is that?! Because search engines find most of my “quality” content relevant and useful, I appear in various keyword searches when it calls for it. It means someone looking for Arnel Pineda or Kapatagan, Camp Sabros or Julia Roberts or Lea Salonga or Broadway or even Pinay Scandal and Sexy Filipina and Filipina images arrives to the site from Google! I love the latter part! I can imagine someone typing Pinay porn and end up disappointed finding this is not a porn site! It is the only SEO related content I did to help an initiative to reshape the Filipina Image on the internet! I wrote the article over a year ago I think and people are still finding it by Googling somehow. More people should write decent articles about the keywords Filipina, Filipina images, Pinay, etc. to level the playing field.

Another great thing I discover is that people actually stay on the site an average of 3 to 5 minutes and get 4 to 6 page views a visit. This is something every blogger should think about. Getting traffic is one thing but getting people to stay at your site for even one minute is a huge task. You must have heard of bounce rate. Wiki explains: “It essentially represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. If your bounce rate is high, then you need to do something about it. It means that your readers are NOT really visiting your site but was just there long enough for your site to load, skimmed through your headline and moved on to the next site.

Entrecard (EC) comes to mind. This is the downside of this powerful and effective advertising exchange network for bloggers. In my desire to drop the maximum 300 cards to 300 websites daily, I was doing the same. As soon as the page loaded, found the Entrecard widget- dropped my card and moved on- sometimes not even noticing the blog name or who or what site it was I just visited. I was “bouncing” every 5 seconds from one blog to the next. I felt awful. It didn’t feel right. I stopped doing that at once and only visit a few now to which I actually stay and read some of its articles! But how many people are still bouncing to earn EC credits? You can’t stop them from doing that. That’s why you need some quality content to have actual readers coming into your site who are not necessarily bloggers to balance off your bounce rate. I must say that you should have at least more articles directed for general public rather than purely blogging related posts targeted at bloggers.

I have a funny feeling that some bloggers are not really readers. Most bloggers would visit your site and attempt to read ONLY your latest article. They rarely check out past or old articles. They’re busy people and they don’t have the time to explore our website. They have lots of SEO to do and only have little time left to care about their own sites foremost while balancing offline life. Where does that leave us? If you maintain a personal blog, you have to go after the non-bloggers to read your stuff. You know they’re coming when your inner pages are being read coming from search engines using keywords to land on your articles. You know they’re coming when your older popular pages have page ranks in them different from your homepage. Make that a goal: to have a page rank in some of your inner pages. You could have a PR of 4 in your homepage or landing page but if the rest of your inner pages have no rankng in them, it still means you are not getting enough reads or page views.

My tracking stats is an open book, find it on my sidebar to further see the numbers.

Bonus: Monetizing the blog

I found out along the way that people are making money blogging, in fact majority of blogs are geared towards making money online. Note that I did NOT add this to the steps in blogging because I don’t think as a personal blogger that this should be part of our goal. It is an added bonus to our site that we could earn something from what we’re doing but to focus on just making money online without putting any effort to our posts is not the ideal path to go. Money isn’t everything. Either change your niche into something else but don’t go talking about Botox or dishwashers when your site is postcard collecting for example (my other blog).

There’s nothing wrong with Pay per post blogs, I found some great ones that are successful in mixing both paid and personal articles. However, some bloggers put in article after article that are nothing but paid advertisements with paid text links cloaked in some made up personal story to make it appear that the product is actually helpful or necessary when the product or service isn’t even available to the blogger’s location. How do you build credibility when you start recommending Circuit City or Best Buy to your readers when you’re blogging in the Philippines or Australia? Except visiting their websites, you’ve never been to any of its physical stores, you’ve never received any shipments from them because they don’t ship internationally, you can’t be telling me why I should shop at these stores. You can’t tell me about heating systems either or snow removal tools because it is non-existent in the Philippines!

It’s all about choosing the products or services to review that can blend in well with your blog. Don’t go grabbing every imaginable ads because most readers would frown on a personal site that has PAID written all over it. In the end, what you have is a personal paid blog with no relevant content and value to your readers. You’re earning sure but you’re writing for the companies who pay you to blog. I say, balance it out. You can’t cover every paid ad especially the ones that are totally unrelated or sticking out like a sore thumb in your site. I also can’t stress enough the importance of disclosure. Personal bloggers should be transparent to their readers. Aside from a disclosure page it would add more credibility to your site to note  that you’re writing a paid post, either at the top or bottom of that page.

I studied at my options. One thing I didn’t explore in at was completely monetizing my site with all kinds of PAY PER POST memberships. It works for most bloggers, just NOT for me. Again, great to earn on the side but personally, not to the point where my writings are going to be dictated by some company and be paid to “lie” for saying this such product is great when I have not tried it(!) or worse that I actually tried it and it sucked but I couldn’t say it because the company won’t accept and pay for a negative review! I would only like to have third party ads on my site. They’re unobtrusive and just there for readers to click or not, ignore or not. I don’t have to render false or unreal opinion about what the ads offer. I joined affiliate networking sites. These are sites where you get either points or money referring others via ads and links. I also added Google Adsense. It seem to make sense so I applied hoping to get cents that would later translate to actual money! After a year of blogging, I’m happy to say that I got my first payment from Google for $113.60! Yet, I have a renewal bill for my hosting and domain, etc for $200.00!! I’m still short! LOL

This ends my State of the blog address! What are you waiting for? Go start that blog you’ve been putting off already! Until next year…

I have decided to make September 28 my blogversary. This was the date I bravely shifted from Friendster blog into Blogger blog exactly a year ago (I went live on September 30th). At that time, I knew nothing about real blogging even though I was already into it early 2005 via my Friendster account.

Since this is my first SOBA, I wish to give a background on the simple steps I did to get me started into blogging in my niche and my current position and state. I don’t have bragging rights- I’m not claiming to be anything. I don’t have any official blog awards. I don’t get a thousand or more views a day, I don’t earn much from it and I’m not trying to be the best blogger.

What I do have is decent and consistent traffic and page views. There’s something to be said there. Blogging shouldn’t be complicated. Blog happy and simply! This is dedicated to all newbies- what I was a year ago!

First step: Blog hopping and Finding your niche

For the most part blog hopping helped me a great deal while starting! It’s the best teaching tool for any newbie wanting to start their own blogs. It’s like window shopping for a website with live working themes and plugins and sidebars. As I navigate from one blog to the next, I learned what could work for me or not! There are some really sleek, neat looking blogs out there but there are also tons of crappy, sloppy ones! Sifting each, taking the best and discarding the rest- I was able to formulate what I want in my website.

I wanted a personal mixed bag for this site, allowing me the flexibility to talk on any subjects from family, travels, music, media, entertainment, opinion, photography, TV, the internet, technology, love/dislike of country, etc. I wanted a simple theme layout with black as the main background.

I followed up this site with a hobby blog, showcasing my interest in postcard collecting and then later on with a blog for a restobar I co-own in the Philippines, and then a Filipino Quotes blog to post quotations related to anything Filipino or the Philippines either by Filipinos or foreigners.

The best learning experience is going out there and blog hop! Call it lurking, spying, checking out, snooping- the only way to discover what you want in your blog is by learning from others. That’s what I would call it.

Second step: Choosing a blog platform

Venturing with Google’s Blogger platform was a smart move because there was no pressure to do everything right from day one as it was free. Free in the internet is awesome! Free allowed me to experiment on a lot of things, messed with the HTML codes and fixed them (without knowing how I made it worked again)!

With a blogging platform in place and a theme, I was ready to blog away! I imported most of my old posts from Friendster just so I could have content right away and so I could see how posts would look like in Blogger with photos and all. Wait, I didn’t import them with a click of a button! I had to manually copy and paste each article because Blogger and Typepad aren’t talking to each other. Blogger for that matter does not have an import/ export feature period. That was a pain.

Once I learned the basics, after 3 months with Blogger, I shoot for the stars and headed to the BEST BLOG PLATFORM there is, Wordpress. Wordpress self-hosted isn’t free. You have to commit to blogging because once you start paying for it, it’s not going to be pleasing for you all the way.

Third Step: Getting Internet traffic with Social Networking

With a week’s worth of content, the next step was how do I get people to see my new site? Social networking and blog directory is the answer. In Friendster, my readers were mainly contacts on my lists and people already on Friendster. I didn’t bother promoting it. I wrote, I published and that was that.

To successfully kick off any blog in the “real” blogging world, you need to self-promote it initially. There is no way, people will magically visit your site without any kind of announcement. That is like preparing for a huge birthday party for yourself. You prepared for weeks, cooked laboriously, spent endless nights cleaning your house and filling in loose ends. On the day of your birthday, everything is set. You waited for people to come expecting they would remember your birthday and come to your house to visit. Nobody came except your family. You forgot one important thing while busily preparing for your supposed huge party- you forgot to sent out the invitations!!! Get the picture? Invite people to your site.

I joined Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, Spicy, Fuelmyblog, Romlet, Stumble Upon and the latest- Entrecard. I submitted my sites to tons of blog directories and exchanged links with blogs I liked. I was promoting my site to my Friendster, Multiply and Facebook accounts. I was rolling.

Fourth step: Pacing yourself

At this point, your visibility in social networks are now working for you. People are flocking to your site. it is now time to loosen up a little bit. This is hard to do when you’re pumped up because people are taking notice and coming to your site by the number.

In the “real” world of blogging, most bloggers take everything seriously; obsessively and excessively if I may say so! I honestly felt the rush in my first few months myself! I wanted to publish as many posts as I could, visit as many sites as possible to gain mutual visits and find all possible topics in God’s creation for a post. There was a need to check my blog multiple times a day and tweak my codes until it stops working and then spend time fixing it again! And again!

The challenge is to pace even restrain ourselves so we don’t get burned out. If we don’t overcome the “addiction” to blog excessively in the first few months, once we withdraw from it- it’s all over. We will lose interest altogether and end blogging as fast as when we started it.

On a good month, I try to blog twice a week. On a bad month, I’d be lucky if I could blog once a month. That’s ok. The key is continuity and creating timeless quality content.

Fifth Step: Getting Internet traffic with Quality Content

This is the most important step that most newbies fail at. Why? Because as in other cases, we all want easy and we all have one thing in mind, capitalizing on our sites. How to make money online?! After making friends with other bloggers, growing popularity in social network groups, traffic increasing, we want to make money now- and fast!!

Well not so fast! We must first create timeless, quality content that anybody can relate to- not just bloggers. Understandably, personal blogs are like an open diary but please don’t make it all about you, me, myself and I. There are ways to incorporate talking about yourself all the time to other places, people and things.

SEO, Tech and Make Money Online (MMO) bloggers’ mantra is all about SEO or search engine optimization. They give all kinds of tips on how to increase your ranking in Google or how to have your site show up in Google pages with the ultimate aim of eventually landing on the first page of Google search and even be number one on the list for that particular keyword. All those are good advice. The bottomline however is QUALITY CONTENT. Would you believe me if I say I never worked on my SEO for my blog name yet this blog appears on page one of Google when you type “Sinigang” and this is not even a food or recipe site blog?! Even moreso when you type “Sinigang blog,” I appear in 5 of the 10 links on page one of Google search. “Sinigang for the Soul” is a given as it is too specific to my blog, all 10 links refer to my site.

You can do everything and anything to increase your PageRank or ranking in searches or you can focus on one thing: improving your content! In the end, content is king! It’s true, that’s all I did. Except for joining various social networks already mentioned above, I never did anything special to make this blog or MOST of my articles appear on Google.

When I took a vacation early this year, I was in and out of blogging for 3 months. In April, I only had 1 post! Surprisingly, I was still getting the same traffic more or less as though I was actively blogging! That goes to show that I have at least some decent content that people are reading with or without recent activity. That doesn’t mean I could stop blogging and be gone for months again! That just means that I have to continue creating articles that can be read or re-read today, six months from now and two years later and still be relevant to a reader.

Please continue here for the second part. The article has gotten really long- I had to splice it. Happy annniversary to this blog!

As if I don’t have enough widgets on my blog, I found another handy blog tool that I couldn’t resist having. The name is ROMlet.

ROMlet is a three in one widget: a brag badge, bookmarking tool and stats counter- for now. Who knows what other cool features this fresh website has yet to add since starting only a year ago? At a glance it looks as though it is just another blog social networking copycat but wait, there’s much more to it!

*Romlet is useful to both a blogger and their blog readers in multiple ways, despite the deceptive simplicity of the widget itself. Romlet helps a blogger quickly assess their own daily statistics and see their refering sources without logging into an analytics account. In turn, Romlet shows a blog’s reader the best buttons for bookmarking and supporting a blog. It also encourages readers to return to a site, out of curiosity bout refering sources.*

On its website, you can see “Currently Popular Articles on Romlet User Sites” which attracts you to click and read more- (like the Blogrush widget or Entrecard). It offers incentives to users by getting and giving referrals. It displays current and on-site information to you and your readers. It allows bookmarking of blog posts like Addthis; but unlike Addthis, *ROMlet automatically provides buttons that are up-to-date and relevant each time a visitor sees it. Like a FeedBurner readership badge, Romlet shows information about incoming visitors but is limited to one kind of statistic: number of feed readers. Romlet shows off the best statistics by displaying top referers at any given time.*

The process of registration and putting the widget on my blog was hassle-free! It took me about a minute to set everything up.

You’ll find yourself comparing it with a lot more blog resources available but you can’t deny it’s uniqueness. To go on, it works very much like MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog, Bumpzee, FuelmyBlog, RSS readers, Feedjit it, Stats counter among others but rolled into one, making it really another useful, relevant widget to have.

See the widget live on my right sidebar! Get your own and boost and boast your blog popularity!

* Information Source

Jim Killeen, Executive Producer/Director
Google Me, The Movie

We’ve all done it! Admittedly, I do. It’s among my fave pastimes in the internet: Googling my name, my family’s or somebody else’s name. It’s always interesting what one can find by Googling a familiar name. It’s even more surprising to find a name exactly the same as ours.

For Filipinos and I guess for people with Spanish lineage, it is very rare to find names that’s exactly theirs. Blame it on our parents who seemed to find pleasure in blessing us with 2 or more! I have 4 names (including my middle name, which is actually my mother’s maiden name) with Maria as the first name. My three other sisters have Maria for their first names as well and they have at least 2 more excluding our last name.

In America and most parts of the world, people have only one first name, a middle name (that is actually just any other name-not from their mother’s maiden name!) and a last name (which could be taken from the father’s or the mother’s). Most often, they would drop the middle name altogether and just use a first and last name as in James Smith, Charles Davis, or Jennifer Taylor. Much easier to Google and finding a match, isn’t it? Sure beats finding the exact person with the 4 names I have!

This guy from Los Angeles, Jim Killeen takes Googling his own name to the next level! He made it into a movie! It’s the latest buzzword now here in America, “Google Me”! Like you and me, he Googled his name and found a list of his namesakes. This lead to an idea of what if I track and meet these people? He did and thus transformed his remarkable journey from different parts of the world into a documentary-movie that premiered in YouTube last Friday entitled Google Me.

“What do a cop, a swinger, an Irish priest, an engineer, a father of eight, an Aussie and a gambler have in common?” says the YouTube description. The documentary of course, stars 7 guys named Jim Killeen.

I was really impressed with the whole concept! Considering that we all have done it: Googling, that is. Yet, this guy thinks, what’s really in a name? what could I possibly have in common with these guys who have the same name as I have? Is it just the name? By realizing the idea, he met, connected and bonded with 6 other Jim Killeen and you know they each have found a friend in each other for life. This is another one of those, if you have an idea- do something about it! Follow where your heart takes you! The result may pleasantly surprise you and impact your life forever!

The 90-minute film is still available in YouTube for FREE for a limited time. The official website sells the Google Me DVD for $29.85 including shipping throughout the United States.

________________________________

ON THE SIDE: I am back from a long, very satisfying vacation in the Philippines! I am back to reality!

My previous post here has been about my growing discontent with Google in general and Blogger in particular. The change Google made a few weeks ago included a permanent rel=”nofollow” attribute in its comments page. Since it is a separate page from the main blog, there is no way to manipulate its template making it impossible to remove the tag. Regardless of whether you want to be a Do Follow blogger or not, you can’t make the choice because there’s no way for one to remove the simple yet powerful tag. Your hands are suddenly tied in that regard.

Google launched the “rel=nofollow” attribute in early 2005 to combat spamming in blogs. Major search engines like Yahoo and MSN liked the bit so they followed suit. It was initially seen as a great idea because really, spamming has become uncontrollable at that time.

What is the rel=nofollow tag?

Rel=nofollow according to wikipedia, “is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.” Simply put, the rel=nofollow tag aims to blacklist spam comments left on message boards, forums and blogs. Spam comments are comments with no relevance to what the post is all about and is usually just a link URL pointing you to a site selling or promoting something- unfortunately, most sites are of obscene nature. Spammers come in huge numbers and it is a pain to remove the comments one by one when they come by the hundreds in your various posts. Blogs where the comment moderation is turned off are the ones mainly targeted.

Why do spammers love to spam blogs?

The reason is simple. Blogs have a wide, diverse audience and usually has huge content. Most blogs also have strong PageRanks (another Google owned trademark!) and spammers want to benefit from that. When you link with a blog, search engines crawl that link and will consider that link almost as important when attached to a page that has a PageRank. So then when one is searching for something and that blog shows up, most likely that spam comment will show up in search engines as well.

With the rel=nofollow tag attached to a template by default, spam comments WILL NOT be indexed by Google or other search engines thereby will be ignored by the search engines and will have no value at all whatsoever. It render the comments totally useless from a search engine’s point of view.

Now you see where I am driving at here.

While the objective is firstly seen as a deterrent for spamming, it is not totally beneficial to any blogger who cares about its readers and its blog’s ranking because the search engines CAN NOT determine what a spam comment is from a legitimate comment. What it does is totally ignore all comments- legit or not!

With the rel=nofollow tag on, the reader’s comments are never included when search engines rank a page’s importance. So from the standpoint of PageRanking, the blogger gets nothing from the comment and the commenter gets nothing back. It’s a dead end for both.

Is Do Follow the answer to rel=nofollow?

I strongly believe it is! Do Follow, writes a supporter, “is an action or a step a blogger initiates to remove the attribute rel=”nofollow” in its blog codes, either by installing a plug-in: Wordpress plugin or this Wordpress plugin, or manually for blogspot and for movable type. Most bloggers would refer to it as a campaign or a movement against rel=nofollow.”

Google does not prohibit one from removing the nofollow tag. It is therefore a choice we can make. I choose to reward my readers for taking the time to comment on my posts. Personally, I only try to leave comments now to blogs that support Do Follow. We all are busy people and there are millions of blogs out there. It’s impossible for us to visit all of these blogs so why not just visit the ones that will also benefit us in some way? I’d like to be able to give that to my readers and perhaps may encourage them to leave a comment knowing that their URL link will be counted by google and other search engines.

I’ve read that even with the rel=nofollow tag on, spammers are still out there! It doesn’t stop them from doing what they’re doing. So why not remove the nofollow tag to benefit us and our readers?

Blogs have other ways of fighting spams now like entering a word or sets of letters and numbers before submitting a comment or just having to enter information manually and clicking submit; these are moves a spam-robot can’t do automatically hence preventing the spam from occurring. One can also turn on the comments moderation to filter comments before appearing and going live on your site. I like the idea of comment moderation because it gives me control over what’s going to be attached to my site before it hits the blogosphere! I have had a small number of spam comments which I’m truly thankful moderation is on since the comments were nothing but objectionable links leading you to lewd sites!

Again, I think every blogger should make a choice and support Do Follow. It’s a win-win and the benefits definitely outweigh Google’s reason- that of punishing spammers. Why would we punish OUR readers?!

(Now is a great time to become a Do Follow blogger. Rob from Blogs that Follow whom I met on Blog Catalog and MyBloglog and whom I’ve exchanged a few emails with on the subject, is giving out Grey’s Anatomy 2008 calendars to bloggers who become Do Follow supporters! Kindly visit their website to know more about the ongoing promo.)

© 2007

Anybody can go to any search engines to search for anything one can possibly think of. Type a word, phrase, even a question and though won’t guarantee you will find what you’re looking for, it will supply however countless websites (by the hundreds of thousands of links) more than enough to divert your attention and focus on the searches found instead.

Imagine my surprise when I typed Filipina and or Pinay in google! I found some objectionable listings there. Go see for yourselves. Even this paid google ads in adsense on Filipinas is quite annoying! But BIG Thanks to the aggressive and massive campaign of concerned Filipinas, they were able to bring their own websites and other relevant, informative, responsible, refined sites on page one of google, yahoo, msn, ask jeeves among others. It wasn’t the case 2 years ago as I further probed, when the very word Filipina or Pinay would give out totally shameless views of what a Filipina is based on the websites available at that time. Filipinas were merely porn material, flirts, sexy, horny, and mail-order-brides- just for fun, dating and amusement!

I’m joining the concerned netizens and I would like to declare, assert, proclaim that I am a Filipina and proud to be one. If you are a proud Filipina, I urge you to make some noise in the internet. If you are a Filipina wherever part of the world you are, you can do something by being responsible with your actions online. Portray a decent image of yourself because what you do affects the entire Filipinas! True, the world wide web has no barriers, freedom of speech is highly tolerated here hence you can’t censor a website. This is not an issue of censorship or morality, it is providing a balanced look of certain issues- in this case being a Filipina.

Imagine you met someone who never met a Filipina before and doesn’t know anything about our country. He/she finds you interesting and would like to know more, goes online to see what’s out there. Heck, he/she won’t search for Philippines- won’t probably even remember the word let alone spell it. He’d/she’d search for Filipina; types it on google and the first 20 results links him/her to Filipina porn sites, Filipina mail-order brides, Filipina singles, Filipina flirts, hot and sexy Filipina. What do you think that person would conclude about you and Filipinas in general?!

It’s sad enough that we had to deal and we’re still dealing with Filipina representation in the world as domestic helpers, lazy bums and thieves. Being pictured as merely for fun and pleasure is unacceptable! Let opportunistic people who prey on helpless Filipinas by operating porn and Filipina trafficking come, we can’t stop them. BUT you can do something about it. By reading this blog, you already are. Step a little further by clicking on the links I’ve provided here, join forums, make comments, start your own blog (and link them to other Philippine websites such as this) talking not necessarily just about the Philippines and being a Filipina but by speaking your mind on personal issues that matter to you. In so doing, we project a Filipina definition that we are not only beautiful people but are decent, thinking individuals as well!

By having as many websites written by Filipinas and spreading it around, making as many hits or clicks as possible to the websites- we make sure that the search engines are unprejudiced in presenting all available websites about Filipinas and that the internet does not only belong to those who can pay to advertise their (monkey) business! Be proud of your heritage. Spread the word.

Updated on November 2007:

GABRIELA

The Filipina Writing Project

Filipina Images

Filipna Women’s Network

Macalua.com

Filipinos on Wikepedia

Filipina: Isa ring Ina (A mother too)

Duyan

Filipino Librarian

Filipina is a Filipino Woman

Filipina Pride

Ang Mga Filipina ng Buhay ko

The Filipina in the Eyes of the World

Three Things You Probably Do Not Know About a Filipina

What is a Filipina?

If you know any other “clean” Filipina websites or about the Philippines/Pinays in general, kindly post them here so we can continue passing the word out!©

StumbleUpon is the new google or the new wiki that’s taking the net by storm. Already boasting over 3 million users, been featured on TV and tech magazines, this is one sure find you want to keep! I just stumbled on it a week ago and I’m hooked! This is the Myspace or Friendster of bookmarks and links. There are millions of websites on the internet. One can’t possibly explore even half of it in one’s lifetime.

This must-have helps you discover websites that are only relevant to you, according to the preferences you included.The best thing about it is, it has a toolbar add-on with Mozilla Firefox so its so easy to use. Everytime you click stumble, you’ll be in a whole new world of serendipity! It’s exciting what you can discover in every click! It’s building a community of people helping each other bump into something new and interesting.

Everytime you stumble a site, it would ask you to rate it to help the next stumbler. In that way, only relevant sites are being distributed and the rejects are well forever be buried in the bottom of the internet ocean. A very intelligent tool! The only downside is it’s addictive. I recommend stumbling only on your lazy nights or spare time– or you’ll never get other things done!

__________________________
_______________

Click here to join StumbleUpon!
See my StumbleUpon Page

Don’t have Firefox yet? It’s time to get out of the dark ages that’s Internet Explorer (IE). Firefox in my opinion is way cooler, faster, has more tools and more efficient. Although some OLD websites still don’t support it and I find myself opening up IE or I just totally skip that website, it’s still better interface than IE! I’m not sure how Firefox works in Philippine websites but it’s worth having.©