Tuesday, January 22, 2008

A Tribute to the Filipina

The Filipina by Fernando Amorsolo

According to Dr. Jose Rizal, one of the greatest treasures of the Philippines is its women. Throughout his life, our national hero paid tribute to the Filipina woman, starting with his deep devotion to his mother, to his respect and love to his seven sisters, and to his loyalty to Leonor Rivera. One of Rizal's greatest writings, A Letter to the Young Women of Malolos, contained some of the most moving tributes to the qualities of Filipina women.

Like Rizal, I would also like to pay tribute to the Filipina. As a blogger, I would like to contribute in my own small way to the wholesome image of the Filipina in the internet. I am quite saddened by the fact that giant Google is very unfair when producing search results about the Filipina woman. When you search "Filipina" in Google images, most of the results contain links to adult, dating, and porno websites. But then again, Google only aggregates results that are very popular with website browsers and bloggers (those hunting for Filipina girls or blogging about sex and the Filipina woman).

Fortunately though, the bad image of the Filipina in the internet is rapidly changing. Two prominent Filipina bloggers, Dine Racoma and Noemi Dado established a website called Filipinaimages.com, with the mission of reshaping the image of the Filipina online. Yesterday, when I searched Google for the word Filipina, Dine and Noemi's website topped the search results, indicating the popularity of their site. The creation of their website alone is a giant step forward into the new image of the Filipina in the web. I salute Dine and Noemi for their great efforts.

To give my own humble contribution to Dine Racoma and Noemi Dado's efforts, I will also contribute in my own humble way to re-shape the image of the Filipina online. As a start, I will feature photos of Filipina women so that Google can also include them in their "Filipina" image database.

Since blogs have tremendous power in the internet, I think that by regularly featuring wholesome photos of Filipinas in blogs, blogs can force Google to relegate the adult-oriented photos into the low-end results (as what Dine and Noemi had done for the "Filipina" name) and give priority to the wholesome images. I challenge all Filipino bloggers to support Dine and Noemi's campaign to reshape the image of the Filipina online.

The few photos below are my first contributions to Google"Filipina" image database. I will tirelessly continue to contribute more in the future- by writing essays, featuring heroic Filipina women, or contributing my own photos of Filipina women. I have a very high regard to the Filipina woman.

The first two photographs below are from our old family album. The next photos I shot myself, with full permission from my models to publish in this blog :)

































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