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Every time some ad agency launches a fake blog, outcries ring from the "legitimate" blogging community. "Here Comes Another Fake Blog" is the headline on Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion today, referring to a blog from the company GourmetStation, written by fictitious character T. Alexander.

Read Steve Rubel's article.

Earlier, Steve also pointed to a blog from Captain Morgan, the trademarked character who pushes Captain Morgan rum. (I'm not picking on Steve; he just reports what he's read about fake blogs from other sources.)

First off, the blogs aren't fake. The Delicious Destinations blog from GourmetStation is a Typapd blog. Only the blogger is fake. But that's picking nits. The real question is whether these fake blogs are anything to get outraged about. I've decided not.

You can define a blog any way you like. Initially, they were private journals. (That's the perception David Kistle, IABC's chair, has of blogs, based on his interview posted today on Jeremy Pepper's "Musings from POP PR.") A number of evolutionary paths have evolved, however. There are blogs used for citizen journalism, for community building, for thoughtful analysis, for comic soap operas, for public relations purposes.

Ultimately, though, a blog is a lightweight content management system that allows people to comment. If someone wants to use that for traditional marketing, what's wrong with that? It can fall into the category of "lame marketing blogs." They may be lame. They may also work.

Consider the Captain Morgan blog. Here's a cartoon character writing posts like the one from from April 2 that talks about a bar contest in Detroit. At the end of the post, the Captain (or whatever marketing flack has assumed this silly identity) asks, "What's the best bar contest you've ever heard of? And how'd you do?"

The query produced 80-that's 80-comments. (Example: "Sorry, I just don't do bar contests. I'd rather watch the idiots than be counted as one of them!") Do you have any idea how excited I'd be for any of my posts to generate 80 comments? And that's not even a high for the Captain Morgan site. One post produced 159 comments.

So it's a fake blog. On the other hand, it's attracting consumers who are enjoying engaging-as artificial as the engagement may be-with the company. They're having fun. The brand is being reinforced. All through the application of a lightweight content management system.  It's not like any of those posting comments think they're actually conversing with Captain Morgan. (Okay, maybe a couple, and they've been dipping into the Captain's product a bit too much.) I just don't see anything wrong with this.

Of course, it's a different scenario than one in which a company works to convince readers they're reading a real blogger when in fact it's a fictitious character, or even a ghost-written blog for a real person. I'm convinced Bob Lutz is writing his own posts for the GM Fastlane blog. If someone from GM's PR agency were doing it, that would be a troublesome fake blog.

But blogs like the Captain Morgan blog? I just can't get worked up over them.

UPDATE-In comments to Rubel's post, I like what a couple of people have said about referring to these as "character blogs" rather than "fake blogs." Definitely.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.