The night-owls among you may have noticed that Bungie.net is at least partially back online, and with it, the new My Groups feature that replace the Chapters that were part of the old Seventh Column site seems to be nearly ready. Links to look for existing Groups or create new ones are on the Community page of Bungie.net along with the forums. Right now there's only one Group theme; a theme builder is coming soon according to Achronos.

Additionally, there's a FAQ called Groups 101 that explains what groups are and how they work.

At the moment, it looks like not everything is finished yet; the front page of Bungie.net still doesn't show all the recent news, and the integration with XBL doesn't seem to be online yet, but at the very least you can start reading up on the future of the Seventh Column or see what other users are saying about the new Column.

UPDATE: mrsmiley of Halo Babies and MSXL has put up an excellent summary of the pros and cons of the new system. Thanks Louis Wu.