I changed my blog design two months ago and I got good reviews on it, and I’m happy about that, but what I don’t like is that “designers” have already start to copy it or parts of it.
I was reading the rss feeds for some css galleries and I got the “beautiful” surprise to find a similar one: http://www.revota.com/. It looks that it’s a web agency that are doing web development and design. Why they didn’t come with some original design? Good question. The background it’s the same, the headlines & links colors are the same, the content areas are the same. And as I see it contains elements from other well know designer that I don’t want to mention.
Johnathan Snook has write about Maintaining your Personal Brand Online, where he talks about why personal brand it’s important and how to do it, but it looks that maintaining a personal brand is complicated. You have to be very creative so that other people don’t “clone” you.