Bloggers known for their unbridled opinions are confronting a harsh new adversary: Their bosses. The more successful blogs grow, the more they appear to face the same employer-employee conflicts that traditional media does. Maybe more so.

Last month, Gawker Media’s Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag dumped blogger Nick Douglas in a dispute over journalistic ethics.

This week, TechCrunch’s ambition to go international was dealt several blows when publisher Michael Arrington pulled the plug on his U.K. franchise, which he set up to bring some of that Silicon Valley flavor to ye olde country.

On Wednesday, The Guardian’s media blog reported that TechCrunch, which has emerged as a top product showcase of the latest Web 2.0 start-ups, fired UK editor/blogger Sam Sethi in a dispute over coverage of the Le Web 3 conference in Paris. To cut a long story short, Arrington didn’t like how Sethi handled the warts-and-all coverage of the Paris conference.

Co-editor Mike Butcher resigned in the wake of Sethi’s firing, noting that the move was largely a formality as he had been locked out of TechCrunch UK already by Arrington.

In a posting on his own site, mbites, Butcher decried “the gradual emergence of a kind of ‘cigar-chomping, controlling proprietor’ behaviour amongst some of the most successful blogs.”

The blogosphere is eating it all up.

(Photo: TechCrunch UK, Wikipedia Matt Groening cartoon)