Understanding continuance intention of blog users: A perspective of flow and expectation confirmation theory

Blogs are currently very popular. Many website portals, such as Yahoo Blog, PChome Blog, and Sina, offer different functions and personal services to attract potential blog users, as this generates greater advertising income. Ensuring that users continue to use blog is important to the survival of these portals. Previous articles investigate the system functions and information quality of blogs, but these technologies are already mature. Relatively few studies discuss the flow experience of using blogs. This study investigates whether the userś flow experience affects their satisfaction with, and intention to continue using, blogs. This study surveys 303 bloggers online. Research findings indicate that confirmation, perceived usefulness, flow, challenge, and arousal positively affected bloggerś satisfaction with using blogs; perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and flow also positively influenced bloggers' intentions to continue using blogs. In addition, the findings point out that the higher satisfaction users have, the more are continuance intention users get. This study provides recommendations on how service providers can increase blogger continuance intentions.