Yes, it's taken me a long time to get round to it but I've at last read Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and really enjoyed it. It's a highly readable guide to the world of social networks, crowdsourcing, open source – and the underlying theory of networks, power laws, strong and weak links etc. Although much of the material feels quite familiar now – after all, we've had Linked, Wikinomics, The Tipping Point, Critical Mass and so on – Shirky brings it together in a way which tells a coherent story about why digital technologies have made this matter so much now.

There were a few new anecdotes I particularly enjoyed. One was the brief account of the lawsuit brought by a bus company, Transports Schiocchet Excursions, against a group of cleaning women working at the European Commission in Luxembourg. The women switched from using the bus service – which had banned them from talking or eating on the bus during the 40 minute journey from Moselle – to a cheaper, friendlier carpool. The company argued that their action was illegally depriving it of revenue. Shirky notes that this is ludicrous – yet it is the same tactic being used by record companies suing their customers for preferring other channels of music distribution. The lawsuit he reported occurred in 2005 and was an appeal against an earlier 2003 defeat for the company in a French court. A bit of searching reveals that his anecdote up to this point has spread far across the internet.  I hunted a bit further and found this notice in the Official Journal of the European Union indicating that the bus company had continued to appeal until its case was thrown out – with costs awarded against it – on 11 June 2009. If a smallish transport company will pursue a dozen cleaning women through the courts for over six years, on the grounds that their exercise of choice has supposedly cost it millions of Euros in potential revenues, we can imagine the scale of the record majors' likely efforts before they give up.

Anyway, back to the book. I think the big message I took was the merit of the award of the latest economics Nobel memorial prize to Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom for their work on the way transactions costs shape institutions, whether businesses or social institutions. This is why the internet and mobiles are reshaping everything: the cost of exchanging information is a key transaction cost and it has become close to zero. If you can think of an institution or organization that hasn't yet changed utterly as a result, just be patient: it will.