Technorati reveals that only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs have been updated over four months. This practically means that 95 percent of blogs are essentially abandoned.

One cause seems to be that bloggers start with great ambition but find difficult to attract audiences - so they end up writing for themselves and their close friends, thus being incapable to acquire any revenues.

Another cause appears to be microblogging like Twitter, which, according to some authors, will replace blogging. The effectiveness of the 140 character "tweets" are being debated all over the web, with some recent success stories like Dell's.

Do you blog? Is your blog an effective tool in your marketing and sales strategy?

The blogging hype (in both the original and the micro flavours) is fuelled mainly by the promises of "easy" and "celebrity-like status". That's irresistible bait for (way too) many.

Once they realize that it takes work, perseverance and especially planning to achieve any success, they give up. The fact that readers / followers take their sweet time to show up, turns those instant-celebrity dreams into similarly big disappointments, which can only shorten the life expectancy of the blog.

Of course, there are also ideas that simple don't pan out as desired, despite proper planning and execution.

Either way, there is nothing wrong with failure - it is necessary in order to make room for new ideas.