I couldn’t agree more with Justin Tadlock’s feelings about the prevalence of [column] shortcodes. They’ve been getting baked into a ton of new WordPress themes and there’s no standard for how they’re implemented. Besides:

Users lose this functionality when they switch to a theme that doesn’t support their previous theme’s shortcodes, leaving bracketed words in their content.

It’s just a big bag of hurt. So I love what he’s doing to address it…

His Grid Columns plugin allows folks to drop their post or page content into readymade columns, inside of existing themes, by using a fairly simple, straightforward shortcode. The documentation is a bit sparse right now — and I’m sure that’ll improve before this gets thrown into the official WordPress plugin repository — but I’m totally hoping this gets picked up by the theme community at large.