Today, I discovered two completely different areas where playlists can bring both order and diversity into your stuff:

First, there's music collections. I guess that's what you thought of when you read playlists". With playlists, you can divide your music into different categories, genres, moods and so on. What I really got to appreciate are iTunes' "Intelligent Playlists". Those playlists are not simple static folders you drag and drop your songs into, but dynamic collections of music meeting certain user-defined criteria. If you want to see some examples how you can get the maximum out of those music organization tools, read about "Merlin Mann's playlists

There's another kind of collection that can also be organized with playlists: From now on, you can make playlists of your Bloglines RSS feeds#128. But I'll write about that soon in another article.