Part of the business of Social Media discussed at BlogOn was adoption patterns. Lycos’s Tripod and Angelfire blog hosting services shared the results of their survey of 2,000 users. They make the case that blog adoption is being driven by media sharing, abundant connectivity and advances in ease of use.

Whereas 14% of Internet users own digital cameras, 68% of their bloggers do:

When asked what kind of content their users create, the results mirror ownership of devices. How they share, however, is still dominated by email (72%), burning a CD (58%) and then posting to a site that offers storage (40%). Its implied that posting is on the rise.

Camera phones are the fastest-selling consumer electronic device ever. I’ll assert that photo blogging and moblogging are the fastest growing segments of our little space. Our Corante neighbor is calling this the year of the photoblog.

This directly related to why Blogger bought Picassa, the popularity of Fotologs (especially among Brazilians), embracement by incumbents, the popularity of album complements to blogs and the rise of Flickr. Analyst firm IDC predicts that by then end of 2004, the number of digital images that are captured and shared will reach 249M. This number is expected to grow to 626M images by 2007, a compound annual growth rate of 34%. As the scrapbook goes social, expect much of this sharing to be facilitated by these services.

Also worth noting that Lycos was sold for $95M today, used to be worth $12.5B.