But we are people. We have feelings.

And we like things that are free.

Or seem to be.

Like ThinkFree Online, which is free – unless you happen to be Australian. In which case you have to deal with the big telco, Telstra, via its BigPond online service. If you aren’t a BigPond subscriber, tough.

How I discovered this was that I noticed today that Ismael Ghalimi, the authority on Office 2.0, uses three of the ThinkFree tools on a daily basis. That reminded me that Tris Hussey had enthused about ThinkFree a few months ago and had organised for me an invitation to test the ThinkFree Premium product he was using. As it turned out, I was not able to use that invitation, because I had problems with signing on and after a couple of emails from ThinkFree support asking me details such as what OS I had, I heard no more.

Life moves on, but I did think today, after spending some time on Ismael’s site, that it would be good to have another look.

Here’s what I saw at first:

Not just one “Free” – five (count ‘em) “Free” things. Great!

And just to reinforce that, over on the right hand side of the screen was another declaration that this was free stuff.

OK, time to sign up.

Then look what happened. A notice that I’m being shunted off to BigPond.

And the message was unambiguous: ThinkFree Online is available as BigPond Office Online for BigPond Members only in Australia and New Zealand.

Huh? Just noticed – they dropped the Kiwis in too. What did they do to deserve that?

More out of curiosity than any vain hope that there might be another story on the other side of the “Sign Up” page, I clicked the button.

Definitely no ambiguity there. “Only @BigPond.com and @BigPond.net.au email addresses will be accepted”. You’re not a paid-up BigPond subscriber, you don’t get to play with ThinkFree.

Well, I’m not about to switch my Internet access account over to BigPond just to try ThinkFree. So I guess I must wave goodbye to the opportunity to use this apparently quite excellent product.

Maybe ThinkFree could change the notices on their home page to say “Free…except for Australians and New Zealanders”.

‘cos if you have to have a BigPond account to access it, it ain’t free.

Or is this the model ThinkFree are using for the rest of the world – i.e those of us outside North America? A series of deals with local providers to lock up the service from anyone who isn’t one of their paid subscribers?

The session was billed as being about “blogger unions, podcast unions and freedom of speech”.

Very early in the session there was a fairly extended discussion about the distinction between a union and an association. There was reference also to:

• recent moves to establish a bloggers’ bill of rights
• moves to establish a bloggers’ union and a podcasters’ union
• the newly formed Association of Downloadable Media (ADM) and Aaron Brazell’s comment on that in a recent post

One point made by Aaron during the podcast session and with which I found myself agreeing, was about the challenge of getting bloggers, who are generally very independent in their attitudes, to join a union.

There was also quite a bit of discussion about what members of a bloggers’ union or association could expect for their financial contribution (indicated as $1,000 for a bigger player and $150 per annum for a sole blogger).

I don’t personally have any interest in being a member of a bloggers’ union (in the sense of an industrial organization which aims to establish and protect working conditions and rights for working bloggers).

I’m sympathetic to the idea of a bloggers’ association, provided a case could be made that members could have a realistic expectation of benefits, commensurate with their financial contribution.

An advantage of listening live to Jim and Tris’ podcasts is that they encourage you to phone in and participate with questions or comments. Which I did. As did Steven Fisher, host of Startup Spark at b5media.

I looked at NewsGator Online, BlogBridge, Bloglines, Google Reader and FeedDemon. Each has its strengths.

In the course of the evaluation, one thing struck me forcibly: I had too many feeds to cope with in any given day.

No doubt RSS Overwhelm is not an uncommon experience for bloggers and other keen readers of blogs.

So having sifted so many favorite sites from the great mass of blogs, podcast networks and other sites, how do you sift what you have sifted? How do you get your reading back into something resembling order and sanity?

Enter aideRSS.

I came across aideRSS courtesy of a couple of new widgets and a blog post Reduce the flood of your RSS feeds with aideRSS at the A View from the Isle site of my friend and blogging colleague Tris Hussey. Tris is your man to be up with the latest: I take notice when he waxes lyrical about a new tool for enhancing the blogging process – and hopefully the blog reader’s experience.

aideRSS launches officially today, Tuesday July 24. I was privileged to be given an early look, so I’ve spent a bit of time getting my head around what the tool does and then installing it.

The short explanation of what aideRSS does is:

AideRSS is an intelligent assistant, which continuously monitors RSS feeds, finds the good stuff, creates a PostRank™, and delivers it to you. We do the grunt work of collecting information on every post, allowing you to focus on your agenda and stay on top of the news stream.

PostRank™ is explained here.

What I’ve figured out is that, as well as helping you filter your RSS feeds and highlighting the most popular ones according to various measures, aideRSS also analyzes the posts on a specific blog, including your own. That’s how I get the widget in the sidebar with “My Top Stories”. The other widget, which I’ve headed “Top Feed Stories” has the filtered results from a random selection I’ve taken from that multitude of feeds I mentioned above.

I’ve spent more time today on this than I anticipated, first because in a bit of clumsiness I succeeded in monstering the code for the sidebar, which I then had to re-construct laboriously, second because the widget for the Top Feed Stories is not quite configured to work in a regular blog sidebar. I’ve put it right down the first sidebar so that it won’t cover up other items, but that is only a short term solution. I can narrow the widget display, but that makes the titles and text of the highlighted posts harder to read.

Another minor irritation is that within the display of the widget it says “My Top Stories” but I want it to refer, if some text is really needed, to the fact that these stories are no “my” stories but stories from my feeds, as in the header to this section, “Top Feed Stories”.

Teething problems is all, and from the terrifically helpful responses I’ve had on the eve of the product’s launch from Kevin Thomason, marvellously titled Chaos Coordinator, and Ilya Grigorik, Chief Architect, I know the people behind this program are very keen to solve problems fast.

I’ve been doing the feedback thing. Who knows, even though I’m an eleventh hour tester, I might qualify for a schwag T-shirt!