By early 2000s, blogging has become a global phenomenon in virtual communities and is rapidly emerging as a new form of computer-mediated communication (CMC). In the context of blogs, online trust can play an important role in connecting the author and readers. We identify that online interpersonal trust is reflected in the user profile of a blogger by how much personal information he or she reveals in it. In other words, more personal information a blogger reveals, more online trust he or she expresses towards the online community. In this paper, we explain our cross-cultural research in progress on blog and online trust. With three public blog hosting sites chosen from the U.S., China, and Korea, we first conducted a comparison analysis on blog hosting website interfaces to identify cultural characteristics of them. We then investigated levels of online trust of bloggers from three different cultures, by analyzing their willingness to reveal self-reported personal information in user profiles. Results show that bloggers in the U.S. reveal more information in their profile than ones in China or Korea, which indicates higher levels of interpersonal trust. In addition, we discovered that bloggers in Korea imply more cultural similarities to those in the U.S. than bloggers in China
