Marcotte came under fire last week for blog postings she wrote before joining the former senator's campaign that were criticized for being anti-Catholic. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, called on the Edwards campaign to fire Marcotte and another blogger for their comments. Last week, Edwards said he was offended by the posting but did not fire the bloggers.

Marcotte wrote in her blog that she was resigning because "every time I coughed, I felt like I was risking the Edwards campaign." She blamed Donohue for a "scorched earth campaign to get me fired for my personal beliefs and my writings on this blog."

While several early contenders for the 2008 Presidential race have tools like blogs and social networks to try to create communities of voters to help bolster their campaigns, most so far have also used a heavy hand to control posted content, according to industry observers.

John Palfrey, a professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School, said the blogger brouhaha illustrates the need for campaign IT operations to seek a balance between embracing the increasingly popular collaborative tools to reach voters while maintaining control over a candidate's image. "As you let more people speak for you ' you have more people who have to be accountable for what they say," he said.

A true Web 2.0 application that gives free reign to any and all posters on a candidate's Web page will be "awfully hard to pull off," said Palfrey, who also is the executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "Nobody is ready for that type of openness."