(Read Part I, Part II, and Part III here)

And now the conclusion of our four part series...

So how often do people actually use Civil Netizen?

Since our application is distributed, we see very little direct traffic from our users.  It's quite a blessing and a curse.  We'd love to know every detail about how often CN is used, but in the end, that would entail violating our own rules about privacy mentioned at our parent site, www.civilengines.com.

What are we most proud of with respect to the  Civil Netizen project?

I think we’re most proud of the simply seeing the evolution of our ideas into a real-world working product. Seeing and knowing that people out there in the world are using our product certainly makes us quite proud of what we’ve done. We also take great pleasure in hearing from and helping our users, whether it’s a complaint or a compliment.

Given all the changes on the web, how would we describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

We would say that power and control of the Web is rapidly shifting from big corporations to individuals. However, we would caution that the architecture of the Web still to this day favor service providers with big IT budgets. YouTube is rumored to be spending more than $1 million per month on bandwidth. Regardless of how much user-generated content there is on that site, the bottom line is that it is funded by and controlled by the rich investors and corporate interests, and ultimately paid for by advertising. The current state of the web still tends to favor the service provider. Just read the fine print on those Terms of Service and Privacy agreements and you’ll see who’s still calling the shots with your information.

To keep this power shift towards individual and the networks they form, we need to continue innovating and expand the technical architecture of the Internet. BitTorrent is a glimpse of what power of individuals and their PCs and bandwidths working together can do (and using some sort of p2p technology should save YouTube a lot of money). We cannot stop there. We hope that the concept and idea of “Netizen” can serve as a starting point for users of the Internet to step up and claim ownership of their content, their network, and their applications. We will do our best to solve the technology problems that Google, as the Internet King, has no interest in solving. Real decentralization threatens their grip on the Web, challenges the dominance of their huge server clusters and their advertising business model. There are many, many times more PC and Macs with broadband connections than there are Google servers. If you can unite these personal computers into a seamless network of…You get the idea.

What sites do we read for fun and for work?

For geeking out, we follow many of the blogs of the Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird developers and contributors.
For keeping up with the competition: Slashdot, Digg, Wired, Betanews, Techcrunch, Lockergnome, Valleywag.
For fun: ESPN, MLB.com, Engadget, Joystiq, MSNBC, BostonDirtDogs.com (yes…we're psycho sports fans), and for keeping our minds sharp, fun puzzle sites like cerebral-x.com.

So that's it fellow Netizens.  I hope you enjoyed your short trip behind the scenes of the Civil Netizen project and team.  Now, it's your turn.  We'd love to know who YOU are.  So, if you've made it this far, I encourage you to drop a comment to this post.  Tell us about yourself, tell us about your site, your blog, your product, tell us how you use Civil Netizen...anything you like.  We're always anxious to get to know you all.

Thanks again, and happy Parceling!