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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010generated. The authors then examined the list to select blogs appropriate for this study. Due to the focus ofthis project on active personal blogs by individual bloggers, the following types of blogs were excluded fromthe study: blogs with multiple authors, blogs containing pictures only, blogs with less than three posts on twodifferent dates in the last three months, and blogs used strictly for commercial or organizational purposes(i.e., marketing particular products or office coordination services). In addition, blogs with authors youngerthan 18 years old were eliminated.After the above restrictions, 700 qualified blogs remained. The authors then delivered a survey invitationto 622 of the 700 selected bloggers via emails or comments posted on their blogs. The other 78 bloggers didnot provide their email address or the comment option on their blogs and therefore did not receive theinvitation. Qualified blogs were not visually inspected by the researchers.Six weeks after the invitations were sent out, 148 completed surveys were received, yielding a 23.8%response rate. Among the respondents, 53.4% were male. The education level distribution of therespondents was as follows: about 10% had finished high school, 20% had taken some college classes, about39% held a bachelors degree, and 31% held a graduate-level degree. The respondents came from 32countries. About one third came from the USA, about 30% came from Europe, 25% came from Asia andAustralia, and the rest (about 12%) came from a variety of other regions.3.2 MeasurementsBlog self-disclosure. To measure self-disclosure on blogs, three items were adapted from the generalized selfdisclosurescale developed by (Wheeless & Grotz, 1976). These three items are the general subset of theoriginal 16-item scale. Participants were asked to base their answers to the following questions on their ownblog content: "I usually talk about myself in fairly lengthy blog posts," "Once I get started, I intimately andfully reveal myself on my blog," and "I often disclose intimate, personal things about myself withouthesitation on my blog." All items were measured on a 7-point scale (where 7=strongly agree), and Cronbach'salpha was .85.Face-to-face self disclosure. Three similar questions were used to measure the tendency to discloseduring face-to-face interaction. Participants were asked to imagine that they were talking to someone faceto-facewhen answering these questions: "I usually talk about myself for fairly long periods of time," "Once Iget started, I intimately and fully reveal myself," and "I often disclose intimate, personal things about myselfwithout hesitation." All items were measured on a 7-point scale (where 7=strongly agree). This scale yieldeda Cronbach's alpha of .81.Perceived identifiability. These items measured blog authors' perception of how easily their readers couldtell who they were from their blog content. Three 7-point Likert scale items were developed to measureidentifiability: "It is easy for my readers to tell who I am from my blog posts," "I think people who know mewould be able to determine my identity from the contents of my blog," and "I think if a stranger read myblog, he or she could determine my identity." Cronbach's alpha for this scale was .76.Perceived vulnerability. Two 7-point Likert scale questions were included to assess bloggers' perceivedvulnerability when posting personal information online. Participants were asked to report the degree towhich they agreed or disagreed with the following statements: "It is dangerous to post personal contactinformation online" and "Personal information available online is easily exploited". These two items werecombined to measure perceived vulnerability (Cronbach's alpha = .91).Extraversion. Following previous research (McCrae & Costa, 1996), four items were used as a generalmeasure of extraversion. Participants were asked to rate the extent to which they agree or disagree with eachof the following statements on a 7-point scale, where 7=strongly agree: "I like to have a lot of people aroundme," "I really enjoy talking to people," "I like to be where the action is," and "I usually prefer to do thingsalone" (reverse coded). Cronbach's alpha for this scale was .70.Participants also supplied their gender, age, and education information in the survey. For gender, maleand female were coded as 1 and 2 respectively. Education was divided to five levels from high school (1) toPh.D. (5).247