Foursquare are currently fielding offers from Yahoo, who are reportedly willing to acquire the location-based service for around $100 million. Silicon Valley’s reaction? Don’t Sell Out, Foursquare. Not Now. Despite the fact that this valuation is absurd, one has to marvel at the arrogance Foursquare users seem to be showing. What’s wrong with the Foursquare founders taking their payday? They’ve worked hard, and they have no obligation to their users, at all. Yahoo will try to grow this business, and probably attempt to turn it into a profitable business through advertising. This is one of the main underlying reasons for the Valley’s reaction to the proposed deal. Heaven forbid that a company actually try to earn money from the services they provide. Of course, there are valid reasons for users not liking this deal. They might be worried that the service is going to stop innovating, and it might not reach its full potential. However, underneath all of this, they are worried about advertising.

Twitter has announced Sponsored Tweets.  User reaction? “Twitter has sold out” – something that’s been repeated by thousands, if not millions, of users over the last week or so. Even CNN was having a pop at Twitter over the last couple of days, showing just how much resistance they are going to have as they build a profitable business. Kevin Rose, acting CEO of Digg, put it fairly succinctly today.  Tweeting:

watching CNN, headline: “twitter is selling out”. umm no, twitter is a business that provides a _free_ service to consumers

No doubt there will be much more resistance as this advertising becomes more prominent across the platform, which will probably see users complaining for 10 minutes before realizing it’s going to make almost no impact on the way they use the service. Why is Twitter being criticized for trying to make money? Or, more importantly, why is no one criticising the users for having such an absurd reaction?

David Heinemeier Hansson (CEO of 37Signals) has always been critical of businesses who ignore profits in favour of going after market share. His recent scepticism has been vindicated  over the last couple of days as Ning has been forced to cut down on staff after spending around $120 million of VC funding over the last few years. They weren’t concentrating on revenue, and because of that, people are losing their jobs and VC’s have lost huge amounts of money. Hansson has criticized Ning for their business model, but also Techcrunch’s reaction, which was mixed. They obviously weren’t impressed with the layoffs, but they were impressed by Ning’s increase in traffic. Since that traffic has been ultimately useless in generating revenue, it’s hard to see how that is something to be particularly proud of. Hansson’s somewhat interesting use of the English language summed up the major issue surrounding this industry  :

The just-give-it-away-for-free-and-they-will-come-and-we’ll-be-rich automatron is as broken now as it was in 2001.

Criticizing businesses is fine, but no one is pointing out that Ning is about to lose most of its users because they are simply too tight to pay for the service that is being provided. They’d rather move to different services that might offer less value, but “at least they’re free”. This concept that services should be free, just because that’s what everyone else is doing, is incredibly short-sighted. If more Ning users had chosen the premium option, which doesn’t actually cost that much at the low level, they wouldn’t be in this mess right now. If people didn’t feel so “entitled” to Twitter, they could probably make a lot more money, and probably improve the service even more. Unfortunately, users don’t understand this long-term concept, and they really do feel like they “deserve” these services.

Spotify has this problem. Despite offering a fantastic service, all I hear from friends is how much advertising there is between songs. In actual fact, advertising occurs every few songs at best, and only lasts 30-60 seconds. Given that Spotify gives you free access to millions of songs, it’s almost unbelievable that people still complain so much.

Spotify is struggling to make money.  Not enough people are buying their premium service, and they aren’t making enough off advertising because music licensing is such a horrible mess. If they could advertise more, the service would probably still be here in 5 years time. The problem is, the arrogant userbase (teen music fans) that Spotify provides a service to, would probably leave in a matter of days if advertising was increased. So instead, it’s unlikely that Spotify will last too much longer.

Even if you’re not willing to pay for something, you should be willing to put up with advertising instead. Far too many excellent websites are losing money because their users are too picky about advertising. One example of this is Tech-related sites who lose about 30-40% of their advertising revenue because geeks are ad-blocker-happy. They’d much rather use a Firefox Extension to stop ads from appearing, than actually support the sites they spend hours reading. They effectively leech these sites, feeling that they are completely entitled to the services they are being provided. This is why I will never run a purely tech-related business venture that relies on advertising. Too many geeks are far too empowered, and they are just about the worst customer-base imaginable. Most people who’ve spent time in the real world understand that businesses need to make money, but that’s not something these people understand.

Geeks aside, other types of freeloaders are present all over the net. They leech content and then complain about advertising. They want free advice, free consultation, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the web has empowered these users to the point where they don’t even think about money, they only think about themselves.

This freeloader economy is terrifying for people who want to build great websites. Content doesn’t make enough money any more, and web apps aimed at consumers (rather than businesses) are tough to monetize no matter how much value they provide.There are, of course, still huge swathes of money to be made online, but making it through providing great content to significant numbers of people is becoming harder than ever.

Major newspapers are having to provide their content for free, simply because people aren’t willing to pay for anything online. This has been praised as a “cultural divide” by the tech-intelligentsia, as if new media is winning the battle. That’s not true at all, that’s geek talk. All it means is that quality content providers are being squeezed out of the market. Instead of qualified journalists being paid for the work they provide, and the integrity with which they do it, they are being overtaken by talentless hacks with no interest in providing value.

So the Internet is successfully squeezing professional publications into an advertising-based model that is heavily controlled by users. If a publication becomes too “ad-heavy”, users protest and throw the toys out the pram. Eventually the publication will give up, lower the amount of advertising they show, and accept lower revenues in the hope of more users. 5 years down the line, and they realize they’re not making enough money, and it’s time to close things down. Cue thousands of people crawling out the woodwork complaining about the loss of quality content.

The web has too many freeloaders. Pick the services you like, and support them. If they provide you with a great service, don’t complain. If the advertising gets too much for you, see if you can do better.

A better comparison would probably be between France and the UK, where usage currently sits at 79.4% of the population.  Since the UK is hardly a hotbed of startup activity (it’s doing reasonably well though), that number does not bode too well for France. A while ago I spent a few hours trying to find French blogs that I could add to my RSS reader (the brilliant Feedly), this was not easy. In fact, it was quite fruitless.

Apart from the excellent (but only recently revived) Techcrunch France there are very few professionally written French blogs, whether tech-related or not. Loic Le Meur runs a dual-language blog which is intriguing, but not really something that’s going to be “essential reading” any time soon. I found the odd lifestyle blog in French, but even those were fairly low-key efforts. I’m sure there are some excellent bloggers in France, but where are they? If I couldn’t find them with quite a lot of searching, there is something seriously wrong.

The fact is, French people are still behind on their interaction with the internet. Facebook is huge for students, but that generation is only now coming through and they’re simply not that interested in building new web technology. Leave Paris and you pretty much leave the latest web technology behind, and you’ll struggle to find large communities of people who are enthusiastic about the web.

Blogging became huge in the US (and the UK) a few years ago, but is yet to catch on in France. There’s no one talking about tech, and there’s no one actually using the latest technology. As hard as Techcrunch France might try, it’s nothing like the real Techcrunch, and it’s clear why – there’s just not that much going on.

A financial boost will be great for upcoming entrepreneurs, but any investment would probably be better spent shipping the entire company over to the US. I hate to say it, but right now France needs more than just a little cash to get things rolling. It would be great if there were startups like Vente Privee all over France, but that’s unlikely unless there’s a change in thinking.

French people (in general) don’t agree with entrepreneurship; it’s a left-wing country that values traditional progression and creativity. Taking risks is seen as stupidity, starting out on your own is frowned upon, and this won’t change in the coming months. The government is not willing to help startups, and neither is the media. So why stick around in France? Your startup will be strangled by taxes, beaten down by the press, and cold shouldered by the public. Sounds like fun doesn’t it?

This will all  change in the next decade. The government is beginning to wise-up to the problem, and they’re going to be bringing high-speed fiber to Paris very soon. With a few more initiatives, there’s a chance that France will catch up, but it’s going to be tough.

I spent a few weeks trying to find work at a startup in Paris – no dice. Ironically, the few that I found had already been moved to the US, or acquired by an American company. There are entrepreneurs doing great work in France, but not enough. It’s going to take more than €24m to change the landscape in France, and I hope that extra investment comes soon. France has some of the most creative, intelligent, and exciting people in the world – why is that not being reflected in its startups?

As it turns out, they were horribly wrong. Sure, the web has evolved and there are some exciting things happening, but it’s not gone the same way that everyone said it would. Mobile has taken over far more than some had predicted, and I’m still yet to see integrated semantic services like those that analysts had predicted. Instead, there are plenty of individual services doing exciting things with data, but they simply aren’t interconnected. Consumers aren’t sharing information in the way people had predicted. Social gaming is huge, but social reading is almost nonexistant. I don’t care about every little thing that my friends are doing, and if Facebook isn’t asking them, they sure as hell won’t be giving that information to another service.

Talks and lectures back then were focused on the huge possibilities that would be opened by new web technologies. We were going to see data used in unique ways and the web was going to become more intelligent than ever. That simply hasn’t emerged. Computers aren’t doing the “incredible” things that some said were inevitable, and the web is still completely reliant on user interaction, not artifical intelligence.

My guess is that services like Facebook and Twitter have really shifted the web in a different direction. Very few people would have predicted that just 2 services would dominate the social web, and most consumers don’t need anything more. If the entire internet was simply Facebook and Wikipedia, plenty of people would still be pretty happy; that’s not necessarily a good thing, but it has certainly hindered some of the more “intellectual” progression that was predicted.

Since social media is going nowhere, and is only becoming more prominent as time goes by, it’s time to look to the future. Where is social media heading? Who are the ringleaders?

I think we’re moving towards “niche” social media communities. Seth Godin talks about “tribes”, groups of people following a particular product, hobby, concept, etc. These tribes are going to evolve into social networks, and a few clever people will capitalize.

Secrets In The Dirt launched a little while ago, and it’s up to a few thousand users without much publicity. Created by golfing experts, and presented as a private community, this is the future. Instead of a group on Facebook or a forum, this is a heavily interactive social network focused around a niche. Sign up, post a video of your swing, and have professionals give you tips. Organize events with other golfers, talk about the latest tournaments, and generally network with other like minded people .

Having taken a peak inside, I can tell you this is one of the most active and fast-moving social networks around. Everyone has plenty of friends, everyone is talking, and there is passion above all else. This is genius in my opinion. Here we have a semi-public community with a thin layer of privacy to give an image of scarcity, that is completely focused around something that people want to spend all day talking about. Instead of just a forum where people post their thoughts, it’s a full user experience where you can network and interact with people, not just talk to them. It’s Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and much more all rolled into one. Except instead of filtering through hours of video and thousands of tweets, anyone can find high quality golfing information/chatter in a matter of minutes. Instead of posting a public video on Youtube for millions of people to see/laugh at, you can post a private video that only golfers will be able to see.

If you can’t see the power in this, then you just need to go and sign up. I expect there are more great examples of sites like this, but this is a good starting point. Social networks like this were attempted a few years ago, but people didn’t understand the technology and there simply wasn’t as much interest in niches. Here’s why (in my opinion).

When Facebook first began, it was all about interacting with friends and talking to people. You didn’t necessarily talk about anything specific, you just talked. A few years later, and consumers are craving something different.

Being a member of the “Golf” fan page on Facebook is not a rewarding experience. You can’t interact with people, talk to experts, or even just get involved with a community. If you want Facebook for golfers, where do you go? Well now you have a home.

Giving a social network a purpose adds so much more to it. Just saying “talk about golf” isn’t that exciting. Saying “get help with your golf swing” is equivalent to telling geeks that there’s going to be a new Star Wars film. Instantly they’ve created value, and they haven’t actually created anything.

Clever marketers will start nurturing their tribes right away. They will create gated communities of incredibly passionate people who will be dedicated to those communities. Suddenly, the Dungeons & Dragons fan club have a home, the Star Wars groupies have found their true calling, and the social web is split into niches. Gary Vaynerchuk is already doing this with Corkd (albeit in a more open way) and with some more TLC it could be huge.

Where’s the money in this? Well, for a golfing social network, monetization is ridiculously easy. Active social networkers will have their money out at every opportunity if you monetize in the right way, but that might be harder for some niches than others. In general though, I see premium membership models being the future of these networks, or they could be used for the basis of content sites, the possibilities are endless.

I want to talk about the current argument that’s running through my head. If you want to “do something” in the online world, you need to get started. In order to get started, you have to have an idea. So where do these ideas come from? Are they just plucked from the ether? Are they only presented to people sipping coffee in Silicon Valley? Possibly, but I don’t think that’s really the problem.

Ideas are cheap, most people know this. Actually, I should probably say, most intelligent people know this. The fools in this world go around saying “I had that idea 5 years ago” or “I could have built Facebook”.

Why the hell didn’t you then?

On the other hand, most people don’t want these sort of ideas. Or rather, they can’t act on them. I could never have built a social network like Facebook 5 years ago. I couldn’t do it now either, even if Facebook wasn’t around. I don’t have the skills, the cash, the time, etc. and I’m fine with that. The thing is, I don’t want an idea like that, I want an idea that I can act on now.  If my idea would ultimately rely on me going to Silicon Valley and picking up venture capital, the chances are, I’m not going to do it. I’ve got other things to do in my life, like get a Degree, Masters, PHD, etc.

Some ideas, however, don’t rely on that. Some ideas can be fairly niche, and yet still make you a hefty sum of money. These ideas are far harder to come by. If you’re going to build a product that tailors to a specific niche, you have to be part of that niche – at least if you’re going to be highly successful. So what do you do if your hobbies and interests don’t inspire your ideas?

I have no answer to that.

Quite simply, I do not know what I want to create. I could spend the next year of my life thinking and I think it would be 50/50 whether I’d come up with something worth building.

One of the things I struggle with is the battle between building content and building applications/software. Here’s why:

Content doesn’t scale in the right way. When you first start a blog, online journal, magazine, etc. you have nothing. You have no traffic, no exposure, nothing, apart from words. Now, even if you do get exposure, you’re going to have to produce more content, hire writers, deal with advertisers, and at the end of the day, you might only break even. Was it worth the effort? Probably not. Owning a highly successful blog won’t make you rich. It’ll probably earn you a living wage, maybe even a bit more, but I just don’t think that online content makes enough money to allow you complete financial freedom.

The best way you can monetize online content is through a product. Whether it’s an e-book, a membership program, DVD’s, or something else, a product is your best way of reaching higher levels of revenue. Unfortunately, most content sites simply aren’t in the right area to charge for a product, so they’re left with ad-revenue, which is measly. Having a product allows your business to scale far better. It gives you an added revenue stream that you can use to increase the size of your content site, and therefore make more sales. I believe in digital products. They make people huge amounts of money, but the people in Silicon Valley choose to ignore them. It’s not “sexy” to sell copies of an Ebook about training your dog, but it has made Frank Kern (online marketer) more than 2 million dollars per year for the last decade. How much work is he still doing on this product? None.

It is, quite simply, a very direct way of making money. People are millionaires from online products, that aren’t even attached to a content site. Once you’re an authority in a niche, or you have high levels of traffic, it’s almost criminal not to bring out your own product. You can leverage the power of your main site to make your product an instant hit.

So content can work, in certain areas. The problem is, it’s a hard slog. Writing thousands of words just to get 100 visitors a day is tough, very tough. It’s not that exciting either, let’s face it.

Now we move onto software, which is where the money lies, but not necessarily the ideas. Software companies make far more money than content companies are able to, in my opinion. If you’ve got a good piece of software that solves a problem, works well, and is marketed properly, you really don’t have to sell many copies to completely obliterate  a similar sized content company.

The problem for me is that software is hard to develop, and there just aren’t that many opportunities around. How am I going to develop a quality software product? I don’t have the programming knowledge, and I don’t have that much cash to throw at something like that.  I could probably outsource the development cheaply, but the software would have to be extremely basic, so it would need the perfect niche/idea. Does that idea exist? I’m not sure.

Of course it probably does, but those ideas are unbelievably hard to come by. The guys from 37 Signals say “Scratch your itch”, meaning to develop something you are passionate about, or that solves a personal pain-point. Do those problems exist to me? Not really. I might have the odd problem, but if i look online, there are about 15 different applications to solve it, so where’s the space?

Yes, ideas are cheap, but I’d pay a hell of a lot for a decent idea round about now. Nothing huge, nothing incredible, not the perfect idea, just something that can be honed into a real business.

Some parting thoughts.

Steve Jobs, in his commencement speech at Stanford University a few years ago said this to the students:

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish

It’s all about taking action. Doing things that you’re not sure about at first, and making the most of your opportunities. Maybe this post is a classic case of over-thinking?

Tim Ferriss (author of the Four Hour Work Week) keeps a little note on his desk which asks the question:

What is the one constraint, if removed, that would make me 5 or 10 times more productive?

There are  a lot of things I could answer to that question, but perhaps more worrying is the fact that none of them are particularly large barriers, and that I could probably pretty easily be a hell of a lot more productive than I am right now.

On the other hand, Mashable has slowly been catching up to Techcrunch, and it seems they’ve managed to take them over following a huge 50% boost in traffic in the last 12 months.

Mashable is the blue line that overtook Techcrunch in May 2009. That’s pretty impressive and really hasn’t been publicized enough. The problem is here is probably that, for many, Techcrunch controls the tech news, and unless they make it obvious, people simply won’t realize.

Will Mashable continue to rise? Hopefully. Techcrunch  has had numerous controversies and its founder Mike Arrington is one of the biggest blowhards in the industry. I respect what he’s done, but he’s obsessed with “winning”, and now he’s losing to someone who isn’t as maniacal and has been able to make friends rather than just alienate people.

I’ll leave the analysis to someone who’s better suited to it. All I know is that Techcrunch is still probably a bigger brand than Mashable, and these traffic numbers are hardly a precise science. However, the increases that Mashable are seeing mean that Techcrunch will very soon be left for dead.

1. Joining Fan pages that ask you to “Become A Fan to see this picture”. Why are you becoming a “fan” of something that you can’t see?

2. Joining Free “insert expensive gadget” groups/pages. Do you seriously think you’re going to get a free iPad because you joined a group and then invited all your friends? The below group is a parody by the way, if you were stupid enough to think that’s what I was talking about.

3. Joining a “New {insert facebook feature}” fan page/group.  These are absurd, and yet people still join them. What’s worse is that they don’t just tell you to download an application, they tell you that you have to invite all your friends in order to “activate” the new feature. Really people? You’re that stupid?

4. Blatant marketing attempts and clearly illegal websites – all thrown into one group! Is this a good idea when your profile is public? No. Are you actually getting full movies for free? No.

So it’s a win-win situation then! What could possibly be amiss with such a helpful group?

5.  Using annoying Facebook apps and allowing them to post to your wall. I don’t mind if you want to play Farmville – that’s your prerogative and it’s probably quite good fun. But why do you think I want to be told when your sheep have gone missing? Stopping these applications from posting to your wall (and therefore everyone’s news feed) isn’t hard – it’s actually very easy. Fortunately, Facebook now allows you to hide a particular application from your news feed, but I still think people should realize that they are posting hundreds of messages whenever they spend 20 minutes “harvesting their crops”.

I’ll have another 5 pretty soon. There are so many ways to make yourself look stupid on Facebook that I could do a whole series of these!

1. People make weird decisions about who they follow. It seems pretty obvious that twitter is great for breaking news and interacting with people who you normally don’t get a chance to interact with. So what’s the point in following, for example, Paris Hilton. All she does is post things like “Buy my new fragrance, it’s hot…” or “Hi Ashton, love you lots xxx”. No one can ever hope to actually get a reply from her (although some very sad people do try), and she doesn’t offer any value, so why follow her?



2. It’s mainly a platform for vanity. I’d venture to say that 80-90% of the accounts on twitter have under 100 followers, and are following just as few. Most of those followers are probably spam, so really, you’re 10,000 tweets are being sent to about 20 people who probably couldn’t care less. It seems twitter only really becomes valuable when you’ve either got a specific reason to be there, or you have at least a few hundred followers, probably more. I’d say most people are just tweeting in the vain hope that someone is reading and getting excited about their breakfast.

3. The trends are messed up. Every so often you get some pretty interesting stuff, but most of the time it’s absolute nonsense. It’s often something that has been deliberately made to trend by a set group of people. For example, that rare and vomit-inducing breed, the female Justin Bieber addict. Either that, or it’s being used for something fairly explicit. It’s mainly stuff about sex or relationships, and given the language that these tweets are composed of, it’s really not coherent or intelligent at all. I don’t think this specifically applies to one group, but I see a large majority of black Americans engaging in this part of twitter. I think that demographic, from what I’ve seen, is twitter’s bread and butter. They use twitter to post random stuff that they (and no one else) find funny, and they don’t really care that no one is reading it. I’ve got no problem with this, but they fill up the trends and basically make that section of twitter about as useful as a chocolate teapot, just slightly less delicious.

4. I still don’t see the attraction for average consumers. It simply isn’t useful. It has some cool features, and it might be a little bit fun, but for 99% of the people in the world, it just doesn’t serve an actual purpose. Unless you’re a personal brand, business, or someone who’s whole circle of friends is tech-savvy, Twitter is never going to be integral to your social activity. About 3 of my genuine friends use twitter. Nearly 300 of them use Facebook (don’t even get me started on the popularity contest that Facebook has become). Of course, twitter gives me access to famous people and occasionally I’ll get to talk to someone I normally wouldn’t be able to, but 97% of my friends don’t really care or need that sort of interaction. In short, Twitter still hasn’t reached a point where most consumers will have a circle of friends immediately. Until it reaches that point, people will sign up, try it, and then leave a few weeks later.

5. Innovation? Twitter has barely innovated. They’ve set up trends for a few places, but not many, and as I’ve said, trends are pretty much useless anyway. Lists are the biggest farce since Manuel Almunia (Arsenal GK), the re-tweet feature is annoying more than helpful, and I still see the fail-whale far too often for my liking.  Twitter has experienced huge growth, but I can’t help but feel that this is it. This is as far as Twitter is going to go, and it’s all downhill from here in my opinion. It is still useful for news and some interaction, but without innovation, twitter will never get even close to Facebook.

6. Third party apps. I’ve never really felt that great when I’m using apps or tools to tweet/track my account. I just don’t really see the point, but then again I’m not using a phone to tweet. None of the PC based applications particularly impress me, and I don’t use Twitter enough to need any of them desperately.

Overall, I don’t think that many people love using Twitter. It’s great every now and again, but their core userbase is much smaller than they would like you to believe. The majority of people using twitter are not making thousands of tweets, have not got any more than 20 or 30 followers, and only really visit once or twice a day.  I feel like Facebook has a much more rewarding and real experience, which means I’ll never substitute any time on Facebook for time on Twitter.

In a way, I love the anonymity that blogging can provide. You can write about all sorts of nonsense and get away with it, just because it’s anonymous. Sometimes you can say what you really feel, and not have to worry about the consequences. Criticism is impersonal, but so is praise.

On the other hand, unless I was making money from a blog, I just couldn’t care less about what I was writing about. It could be something I was really interested in, but having to blog about it 5 days a week just wasn’t fun, it never will be. Even if the blog was getting comments and subscribers, there was always the feeling for me that it’s just not want I wanted to do.

I kind of moved away from blogs as much as I could, and started dealing with product sites or just general content sites. This gave me a chance to engage in a wide variety of topics, but was still pretty mundane.

I think it’s a lack of anonymity, an openness and transparency, that make me actually enjoy writing this blog.

OK, the content isn’t amazing. I’m not making money from it, and I don’t really get comments. I get a bit of traffic and I get some e-mails/messages that keep me going, but I don’t really need “recognition” when I get a chance to write about what I want.

There have been some very interesting studies that show that monetary reward is really not that much of a motivator. OK so I’ll do some pretty boring stuff if I’m getting paid a lot for it, but I have to be getting paid enough to make it worthwhile. Blogging has never offered that. Even on a semi-successful blog, I could still get more per-post from a freelancing gig than I could ever get from the blog. I also don’t have to market or build up a freelancing gig, I just get it, fulfil the contract, and I’m done. Cash in pocket, no more hassle.

Now, that’s not to say I wouldn’t blog for cash, but it’s gonna have to be a fair bit of cash to make me do it.

There is a certain sense of liberation from being able to write what you want. It’s easy, it’s creative, and I don’t have to worry about money. I also don’t have to worry that much about quality.

I don’t really edit my posts that much, and I don’t spend that much time writing them. If they come out like garbage, then so be it. I do, however, hope that I’ve got enough writing skill to sound better than most without much effort. My blog posts aren’t supposed to be winning a Pulitzer Prize, they are just a stream of consciousness that I power through every couple of days, but I hope they are at least enjoyable/interesting to read.

I’m 18 now, and I’ve been doing this for a while. I think I’m starting to get to the point where, no matter who sees what I write, I can tell them, this is who I am. I don’t need to dress my content up any more, and I can happily say there are certain things that interest me more than others, that you might not find even vaguely interesting.

In other news, the Swedish House Mafia are coming back to the UK in May. They gave me one of the best nights of my life last time around, and I am already sufficiently excited for this next adventure.

His question was supposed to be answered on the excellent (and beautiful) Mahalo, but frankly I’d much rather just post my thoughts on here.

I’m always going to err on the side of the corporate giant in these sort of debates. Not always, and not entirely, but I’m generally swayed toward the capitalist view of things.

The first thing that comes to mind is this. If you asked any single person who is currently obese (and blaming it on Mcdonald’s) whether they would like to be the CEO of Mcdonald’s, they would bite your hand off.

The point is, if the roles were reversed, they simply wouldn’t care less. Everyone wants cash, and the McDonald’s CEO is making bank. So clearly all of these people who are trying to sue this huge company would happily make millions off other people, I have absolutely no doubt about that. I couldn’t care less if someone says “I would want to maintain my ethical integrity” because that’s absolute BS. Those fat people would very quickly change their stance to “It’s not my fault” as soon as they took over the company and picked up their first paycheck.

Second, how stupid are these people? Maybe it’s too much to ask for an ounce of intelligence from someone who eats so much they can barely move, but how is blaming Mcdonald’s in any way a rational decision?

Mcdonald’s make nice food. Becoming fat is a by-product of that. They aren’t making stuff in order to make you or I fat, they are making food that tastes nice. It’s really that simple. If you’re stupid enough to eat so much of it, then that’s your problem, not the people who make the food.

These people would want to blame Mcdonald’s for making their food incredibly nice, thus making it addictive. How ridiculous is that?

I, for one, love a Big Mac every now and again. Why? Because they taste nice. If these fatties won and made Mcdonald’s create a healthier product line, who suffers? People like me.

Most people don’t go to Mcdonald’s every day, or even every week. Most people go for some decent food once in a while. It’s quick, it’s cheap, it’s fast. Why should we be punished for the stupidity of a small group of people?

Obviously, there are things that Mcdonald’s should probably do better. They should be disclosing more of their information (they already are though, so it’s hard to say what else they can divulge) and perhaps they shouldn’t market their products so heavily to kids. However, they are making money. They are making money by selling a product that has many advantages over other products, and they’re selling it in a nice environment. When you put it that way, it sounds absurd that people would sue them for doing a pretty good job overall.

This is all part of capitalism, and I absolutely love that. Why should someone stop making money because someone else is stupid? Now, if you’re going to scam someone or prey on their stupidity, then fine, that’s wrong, and you should get sent down.

But if you’re going to give someone a product that they will enjoy and will keep coming back for because they enjoy it so much, why should you stop? Why should you not make money from giving people food that they enjoy? Mcdonald’s doesn’t pretend that their food is healthy.

It’s pathetic, and I seriously couldn’t care less how insulted fat people get about it. There are overweight people who are overweight because they can’t help it. There are people who are underweight because they can’t help it. I know this, I’m living it.

But becoming obese has nothing to do with your metabolism or your lifestyle. You have eaten too much. Even worse, you have chosen to eat too much. You chose to be obese and now you’re going to blame anyone but yourself.

I just have no time at all for obese people who blame everyone else. If you’re happy being obese, then fine. I’m not going to tell you how to live your life. There was an episode of House M.D a while back where they dealt with a heavily obese man. Everyone criticised him, but he didn’t care. He liked food, he spent his life cooking and eating what he cooked. He didn’t care that he was fat, he knew he was eating too much, and he knew he was going to die early because of it. I have absolutely no problem with these people.

However, if you’re going to get fat, and then start moaning about how the world hates you, how the world isn’t suited to your needs, and how evil corporations have made you fat, then I just don’t care.

Cry me a river. You’re obese, you chose to be obese. You enjoyed every Big Mac you rammed down your throat, and you enjoyed guzzling Coca-Cola till you felt sick. Why is that suddenly someone else’s problem? The guy on Supersize Me ate only Mcdonald’s for a month. Yes he gained weight (not enough to make him ridiculously obese though), but he also seriously messed up his whole body. He could tell that was happening after just a month. So how do people carry on doing it for years on end? The warning signs are there you fools.

Zig Ziglar – a bit of  a legend in the motivational speaking game. Always says that up until the age of 25, he had chosen to be fat. He had chosen to eat too much and he had never really tried to be thin. All his life he had just accepted that he was fat. To quote him:

When you accept something, you make a choice to continue being that way.

I think that pretty much says a lot of what I’m trying to say in this point.

My final point is very simple:

You don’t get fat by eating Mcdonald’s, you get fat by eating far too much food. It comes down to a choice you make, and if you want to blame someone else for the choices you make, then your life isn’t worth living.

(All views expressed are my own and do not represent blah blah blah)