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(New stuff after this important message)

After 16 years of solid, high quality, nonprofit, international service, this Web site is being victimized by those who want to suppress it for apparently nefarious reasons.

The Visual Writer Web site freely presents industry worthy advice gained from experience and contacts, best practices, plus has done research to create advances in the field of writing, plus created and provided tools for schools to promote student interest in writing and for others to do unbiased critiques of writing and movies. Around 100 free nonfiction books are downloaded from it monthly, as well as the 600 Web pages of information. It has promoted groups and free services. It has presented "how to" information on creating high quality market winning screenplays, novels, nonfiction, and journalism. Information presented on this site, and by the author in other venues, has also often influenced or prompted news stories, information put in novels, and nonfiction.

In addition, this Web site provides informed information on the human condition, which writers write about. Some of these articles are even helpful to individuals in their personal lives, as well as to writers creating works. This site also asks an important question: "What kind of world are we creating?" by including commentary on important issues of the day that are important to writers and others, particularly if it can help avoid disinformation, propaganda, and bias. Controversial topics are not avoided on this site. Children are overly protected from entry by Safe-surf ratings where needed. The Webutation.net score for this site is 100. The limited advertising on this site has yet to pay any of its expenses, which are carried by the author.

I personally use the tool, Web of Trust (WOT) on my Web browser to help alert me to Web sites that are malicious, phishing, scams, etc., based on other's experience. I like it. But crowd-sourcing reputation by WOT is a double-edged sword.

Having a good experience on a Web site is a given, an expectation, and is not noteworthy. I do sometimes get thank-you email from people who benefit from the site, even though I try to keep the contact info hidden since I'm very busy. People who visit a Web site and have a good experience are unlikely to click the WOT Trustworthiness and other ratings icons. A good and trustworthy experience is an expectation, not something to merit feedback.

On the other hand, in our very polarized society, there is a huge number of activists ready to do some action at any opportunity, to squelch things they oppose. Who are they? People who are competitors who benefit from opposing what you have to say. People who disagree with your commentary. (The movie industry and even psychology, while having a lot of very good people, also have a lot of people who are backstabbers.) People who promote favorite issues. Competitors, fanatics, zealots, activists, the vengeful, the disappointed... spammers who send email in other's name (we don't send advertising email)... the reasons are endless. Generally there are around 10% of people in any occupation who are willing to harm others for their own benefit. Polarization substantially raises that number, and ironically polarization also happens to be one of the major topics this Web site speaks out about.

An example of this behavior is shown by the WOT ratings of the WebTrends.com business Web site. It has no malicious software on it. Advertisers love to use its services as a tool. But there is a cadre of very biased people who don't like Webtrends because advertisers use it for tracking, a standard Internet advertising custom followed by Google (Doubleclick ad service), and other advertising suppliers, so they can tailor ads better to those they show them to. WOT claims to collect data on people itself. Webutation.com gives WebTrends.com a 100% rating, but WOT gives visitors a warning that discourages them from entering the site.

So, WOT is unwittingly set up to fail at its admirable mission of crowd-sourcing trustworthiness. It provides a mechanism for destroying the good reputation of good Web sites, even though it tries to tell you it doesn't because it "tracks certain user's behavior." Negative campaigning works better than positive campaigning. If this continues, it will turn people away from many good Web sites, and suppress the opinions of those who speak up on controversial issues, and take us back to chaos and subservience to the radicals.

So I ask, is this the kind of world you want to live in? Chaos. Suppression of speech by those who oppose others for commercial reasons or who are activists for causes?

What can you do? 1. Surf safely. Use good tools like WOT. If you are more interested in safety from malicious sites, and less interested in crowd opinions, use tools like, Webutation, Norton Safe Web, Google Malware Diagnostic Tool.

2. Click the WOT reputation ratings for this Web site. It only takes a second.

3. Send WOT - contact (a company in Finland) a message explaining that you are very uncomfortable with their operating mechanism and want them to do due diligence (which will also avoid legal liability for them in various countries), by automatically checking any Web sites that are getting bad reputations from them, so that you aren't errantly discouraged from getting good information from those Web sites. They should never give less than a grey rating to Websites without due diligence and strong proof that they really are malicious, if WOT is to be trusted.

Don't accept from WOT the idea that Web sites can simply pay WOT to visit the site and rate it. Nonprofit Web sites are not going to pay the money to do this. And activists can easily simply outvote their ratings anyway. The problem needs fixed so that it can't happen.

Despite the difficulty, the Visual Writer Web site has again grown in visits, by providing articles that freely help writers become better writers. People vote with their feet, and Google results serve the popularity purpose. Thank-you! Now back to the content:

• Movie Critique Form
• Movie Review Form
• Movie Technical Review Form
• Example of a movie review and a technical review: The Karate Kid (2010)

Blog entries. Directory.

• 20 - Development - Re-architecting
• 19 - Development - Feedback
• 18 - Development Refining
• 17 - Development Cutting
• 16 - Development Rewrite
• 15 - First Draft Critique
• 14 - First Draft
• 13 - Midcourse Corrections
• 12 - Structure and Story Introduction
• 11 - Time to Start Writing
• 10 - Theme
• 9 - Protagonist Character Development
• 8 - Architecting a story
• 7 - Plotting, evaluation, and more research
• 6 - Plotting
• 5 - More Research
• 4 - Research
• 3 - Plotting
• 2 - Concept
• 1 - Idea

My new book, Ontology of God: The voices of the ancients speak, looks at what we can learn through the ages regarding the history of several aspects of religious development as affected by the ancient societies they were in, including law, mercy, and love.