An Exploratory Study of Bloggers' Information Sharing Behavior: The Role of Online Privacy Concerns

Social networking websites have become very popular with Internet users as one of the latest forms of online communication tools. Blogs, recurrently updated web pages with a series of archived postings in social network websites have been discussed as a useful information sharing platform for knowledge management in a collaborative work environment. However, blogs generate growing concerns regarding information privacy issues. This study, based on social capital theory, presents exploratory results about bloggers’ information sharing behavior. The survey results indicate that trust which has four second order factors: economy based trust, trust in reciprocity, trust in other bloggers and trust in social interaction positively affects bloggers’ information sharing behavior. However, online information privacy concerns have a negative impact on the relationship between trust and bloggers’ information sharing behavior.