5. 3D Image Blogging and Website Creation

This idea of 3D image blogging and 3D website creation is an idea that is tailored for those of you who are so fascinated with the 3D venue that you might be willing to pony up a little over $1,000 to start your own 3D imaging micro-business. The 3D images in this blog and on our website could have been taken by you to show off your own geographical areas for tourism promotion and the for the nostalgic reminiscing of your area's expatriates. Others could be created for your family or for your friends' families or for weddings or for other special events. Still others could be created for enterprises that might want to use 3D images in their promotions.

Here's a simple blog we constructed for a friend of ours named Jane. In it we will put more and more photos as we take them so that her worldwide family can view her and her ongoing activities in 3D.

It exemplifies one option of this idea for blogging by suggesting that you allow your photos to be viewed on your blog in the Piku - Piku format at no charge and that you make your money from targeted Google ad revenues and from 3D glasses sales to view the anaglyph versions on another post. This idea is good for friends and for small town and neighborhood blogging.

The second option would use some Piku - Piku photo images on your blog or website but also place albums of anaglyph photos and / or videos within it. In this option Google ad revenues and glasses sales would be used to make you some money.

Here's our tourist website where we do just this for the city of Chicago.This is a growing website that will eventually show 3D visuals of thousands of enterprises and places within the city of Chicago. Here we settled on slide-shows from start3d.com in the no-glasses-3D Piku - Piku format and from Flickr.com in the anaglyph format because we have so many photos to display.

In developing any of these internet ideas, you would have to buy a Fujifilm 3D camera ($450) and a memory card ($40 [$80 for videos]) and the Imagic software ($50) necessary to convert the Fujifilm camera's MPO format photos into steroscopic 3D anaglyph photos so that they may be viewed with red - cyan 3D glasses on any tablet or computer screens. You would also need to buy an initial stock of a few hundred inexpensive cardboard glasses to sell and ship to your fans of your blog and / or your website.

By the way, in case you don't know this, all of the 3D photos that you take will be automatically copyrighted  when you post them onto the internet. Over time AND if they are very unique (hard for others to also produce - say like of a place where a catastrophe or a special event occurs and the scene is forever gone), they could become very valuable.

These ideas might be good entrepreneurial ideas for you (if you are a 3D fan) wherever you may reside in the world because every place is sure to have interesting scenes and / or events which at least a few people somewhere in this world might be interested in viewing in 3D. If you think about it for a moment, you'll come to realize that every place in the entire world has probably already been photographed in the last 180 years since photography was invented. But very few places have been 3D imaged yet, so this is really a wide open field for internet blogging and / or for posting 3D images on websites. You can also 3D shoot events for posterity too like sporting events and / or political gatherings.

You can start up this kind of a low budget micro-business as we have with about $1,000 for the above mentioned purchases and the few extras that always seem to come up. You would also need to utilize a free blog like this one on Google's Blogger or on Word Press or on any of the other free blogging services so as to start with low initial operating costs. As your blog progresses, you might want to increase it into a full blown website which will cost you a few bucks to build and maintain. This will allow you to fully capitalize on Google's Adsense within it. More on that in another post.

In the process of creating your internet 3D micro-business, you can take some tax write-offs from your other personal income for the purchase of your various pieces of equipment, your software purchases and for your initial supply of a few hundred cardboard 3D glasses. You can also write off a portion of your traveling expenses if you need to travel to take your 3D photos and / or videos for the internet. If you buy a new computer for it you can amortize and expense it over 5 years. We plan to do a 3D website on the great scenes in another country later this year and we will write off a portion of our trip expenses to go there and while we travel all around there taking our 3d photos and videos of its many attractions.

From the your targeted Google ad revenues and from selling and shipping anaglyph format red - cyan glasses to your internet fans, you can begin to make some money before you phase out these write-offs. Your initial income will probably not be very big. Ours certainly wasn't. But over time it could pick up for you nicely as it is starting to do for us. And remember,  even earning only a small amount of money for a while makes your blog micro-business into a totally legitimate business endeavor in the eyes of the IRS. This is what qualifies you for tax deductions from your equipment purchases and from your other expenses necessary to the production of your blog, until profitability finally kicks in

Let us mention that above and beyond your initial $1,000 investment, a good new computer is desirable to do the computer processing that you'll need to do with all of the many, many images you will create and in order to post them onto the internet. We advise having a computer with at least a dual core processor or better for fast image conversion processing. If you don't yet have one, an adequate new dual, tri and / or quad-core processor computer with a decent video card and plenty of hard drive memory can be purchased for prices from $600 to $1,500. But if you can't yet afford a new computer you don't absolutely need one to start your blog. However, a new one will be nice for you as you start up and then on into the future, because it will significantly speed up all of your photo and video conversion work.

As we first mentioned, within your $1,000 initial investment, you'll need to make the major purchase of a Fujifilm 3D camera (or its equivalent or better if one comes out). However, if you have the propensity and you want to save that investment money, you can rig up 2 existing identical cameras that you may already have, like 3D photographers in the past have always done, in order to capture your 3D images. But it is so much easier with the Fujifilm 3D camera which we are here touting. Remember, you will get all of this equipment's cost back from your tax write offs and from the sales your blog generates.

Finally, we assume that you will have access to a high speed internet connection through which to upload your videos from your computer to You-Tube so that you can then embed them back from there into your blog or website. When you process your videos in this manner you can gain the advantage of being able to capitalizing on their free promotional tools to get some of their traffic to come to your blog or website.

You also might consider the use of Flickr for your anaglyph photo images (Piku - Piku processed images cannot be posted on Flickr) because of that site's promotional tools for photos which will help you to promote your blog. They also offer 3D print capabilities through Snapfish, their print processing partner.

And then there's Facebook, Friendster, My Space and other social networks within which you may freely promote your blog and / or website, with and through links to it. There you can also upload some of your 3D photos and embed some Piku - Piku processed images and some of your 3D videos as teasers and lures to draw people from those websites onto yours.

Once such a 3D photo and / or video blog or website gets some traffic it would probably give a promotional boost to tourism in the geographical area about which you blog. It would also be a good internet stop for those who once lived in your area to reminisce and / or for those who have visited your area in the past and now nostalgically miss it. They can view the wonderful reality of your blog's 3D images of your geographical area from anywhere in the world and these images will beat any 2D images of it to death as far as realism is concerned.

Such a blog is sure to garner a - WOW or an OMG response from these folks about how nice or bad the place looks or how the place has changed since they were last there! Consequently, you might want to display on your blog or website your e-mail address in order for you and them to correspond back and forth about that. You can also encourage them to "follow" your blog or website so that they can receive automatic e-mail notifications of each of your new 3D image posts, when you make them. If you think about it for a moment, you will realize that all of these folks, because of these factors, will become very good for the "viral" promotion of your blog or website.

This 3D internet activity will probably be well supported by your local community if it's done with their encouragement and maybe even with their participation because of its many benefits to everyone there. So why reinvent the wheel?Use the better business bureau or local community or historical groups to promote your blog or website.

If you do decide to do any of this, please let us know about it and we will help you with it and link you blog or website here on our blog to help you to get some of our internet traffic. We will also encourage our followers to link to those sites and we will encourage any others who are doing similar blogs to link to them as well. We hope that over time, by uniting in cross-links, the viral nature of all of our 3D imaging will contribute increasingly to getting tons of red - cyan anaglyph 3D glasses out to as many people as possible which will further promote the anaglyph 3D format world-wide. Then, perhaps many more websites will create 3D anaglyph images and hopefully, this will all snowball into an avalanche of 3d anaglyph format images on the internet.

You will probably make the most money from your blog from selling the red - cyan 3D glasses to the people in your local community who want to view your blog or website.They may then also show them to their geographically scattered friends. You will also probably make money from your community's expatriates who may contact you to order a few pairs of glasses. Additionally, as you get good at taking the 3D images, you might be able to make some extra money by contracting to do 3D images for some local couples' weddings, family events and / or for community or enterprise events.

Based upon our own experience, the targeted ads on your blog or website will probably be a small part of the money that you make from it, unless you get scads of traffic which we haven't yet been able to obtain. If you do, will you please share your secrets with us and our audience on just how you were able to accomplish it?

In case you are not aware of it, you can also utilize Google's free Analytics software to track your blog's traffic and you can also use Google's free Adsense statistics to track your blog's advertising income performance. Both of these free software services offer you plenty of education about your blog's ad revenue effectiveness and are well worth using. We will help you to incorporate these tracking tools for your blog if you ask us to.

If you utilize any of Google's free services you'll have to create a G-Mail account but it's well worth having one because, as we said earlier, you can use it for all of your internet correspondence. You can also route all of your other e-mail accounts right into it because it keeps track of which e-mail accounts received which e-mails and it allows you to label accordingly each composed e-mail as you send them out under any of your e-mail accounts. G-mail also has great spam filtering because of all of the spam reports from its immense world-wide network of users. So, all in all, it's a good move to create a g-mail account for your blog or website.

Finally, the big picture here is that like individual ants or termites who work industriously on small tasks for the overall betterment of their large colonies, we also should work diligently upon each of our blogs, viewing them as being small but very necessary components in building up the overall world-wide venue of anaglyph 3D visuals on computer screens. If and when we do this, we can be rewarded by making a few bucks while we gain the personal satisfaction of knowing that because of our small efforts on 3D's behalf, more and more people everywhere are enjoying more and more of the wonderfulness of 3D imaging.

Please proceed to May's #7 post linked in the Archive above.