As it’s Good Friday we spent the morning discussing sages — as you do. The topic arose from the death of Arthur C. Clarke (pictured), the science fiction author and inventor of synchronous-orbiting satellites.

I once partly collaborated with him on a book project I was writing for BT. He kindly gave me full access to his library and archives in Taunton, the family home town. He always struck me as a sagelike character interested in shaping a better future from a troublesome present and even worse past. Maybe that’s a good definition of a sage.

But are there any other sages left, especially in the online world which most of our readers inhabit?

A number of living sages sprang to mind. For example, Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, whose advice on investment must be worth a bob or two.

Bill Gates? I think so. He’s veered far from his specialism during his long career and always has views on the shape of things to come. As indeed has Steve Jobs of Apple.

But are they too self-interested to be real sages? Shouldn’t sagacity float free of any self-partiality? That doesn’t leave many to choose from, does it?

I think we should accept the above three figures as sages, with minor reservations. Although they are never going to be Mahatma Gandhis — money just gets in the way somehow.

So who then is The Sage of the Blogosphere?

Dave Winer pops up from beneath the parapet. He writes long and often at Scripting News. If you eliminate the endless links — none has ever come Syntagma’s way, incidentally, but we’re above all that — his longer pieces tend to have a careful, sagelike quality about them.

His problem is that he’s a bit too liberal (in the UK read “left-wing”). A sage should surely not support a political party. Their manifestos are written for idiots by half-baked zealots.

Does zealotry crush sagacity? I think so.

Who else? There are lots of authors in the tech blogosphere who write long articles of a philosophical and speculative nature — Jeff Jarvis, anyone? And I can think of a dozen more. John Battelle, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis …

And how about Tim Berners-Lee who “invented” the Worldwide Web, the internet as we know it. He also writes persuasively about its future as the Semantic Web — Web 3.0 — and was recently given the Order of Merit by the Queen, one of the highest honours in the land.

However, sages should stand out more than just being brilliant at what they do — shouldn’t they?

Questions, questions.

In the political blogosphere Andrew Sullivan writes deeply and never uninterestingly about matters of the day. Last week was a departure when he covered the future of video blogging. But is he a sage? Would he want to be?

Maybe the internet is not the right medium for sages of the old school. Are there sages of the new school?

Perhaps we don’t recognize them yet. Only hindsight will make them stand out from the pack. After all, Arthur C. Clarke was not regarded as a sage when he wrote wildly about satellites in the 1940′s magazine Wireless World. It was only later when small bits of technology were dumped at 22,000 miles above the planet that his foresight was spotted.

I think I’d better leave the question open : who is The Sage of the Blogosphere?

To paraphrase that undoubted sage, Albert Einstein, “Not everyone that counts can be counted, and not everyone that can be counted counts”.

Update : After much thought on this question, I’ve decided that my candidate for The Sage of the Blogosphere is Robert X. Cringely.

If you want to begin to understand the way Google is reconfiguring its pack of algorithms — much to the despair of its smaller commercial customers — you could do a lot worse than read I, Cringley’s latest article on PBS. It portrays the Mountain View operation as a giant can of worms.

[A] problem at Google right now is algorithmic optimization gone mad with the probable result that many of Google’s smaller AdWords customers will go broke this Christmas. Killing longtime customers is not a good corporate policy.

The upshot seems to be that Google is subject to the Law of Unforeseen Consequences, a well-known byproduct of increasing complexity. Worse, Google does not address these problems directly for fear of crashing its already wobbly customer service system. Now there’s a real bind.

We’re used to governments getting into hot waters like this, but they are operated by rather stupid people. Google is run by whizz kids with Stanford PhDs and brains the size of a minor moon of Jupiter.

What’s really going on here? “Algorithms — the smarter the better — are at the heart of Google’s success. But Google’s major failing nearly always comes down to confusing algorithmic efficiency with moral, ethical, or even business correctness. Sometimes good algorithms do bad things and the tendency at Google is to simply not care: it was the ALGORITHM’s fault.”

I’ve always suspected that Algy the Algorithm was a thoroughly nasty cartoon character. Like all such characters, he’s completely indestructible. Even if you flatten him to the floor he just pops up again worse than ever.

As Cringely puts it : “… recently Google started messing with AdWords, modifying algorithms and launching new programs that make the company look good to Wall Street, which is always seeking at least the appearance of improvement, but not to Google’s AdWords customers.”

At $700 a share it may be easy to break with its original customer base, but with the U.S. and world economies going sharply south, even Google may need the support of anyone it can get … maybe even those small-scale, under-capitalized guys who built their businesses alongside its growing infrastructure.

We’ve long been Cringely fans here at Syntagma, even when the sage gets it all wrong. Well, a perfect world is not very interesting, is it.

Next week we are promised an earth-shattering moment from the frog. In his own words :

“And speaking of clever inventions, I want to give fair warning that next week I will make an announcement in this space so astounding that even my 83-year-old mother may pay attention. I intend to change the world a little bit and — as always — will need your help if I am to be successful.”

We’ll be queuing up for the column next Friday, Cringe old chap.

It better be good!

Good news for those of us in Britain delicately poised between buying a Blackberry (I know I’m behind the curve here) and waiting for Apple’s iPhone to arrive. O2 is about to sign the much sought-after contract for the UK and may have it out for Christmas.

It means switching mobile networks for me — I’ve always bought Richard Branson’s Virgin-Motorola phones, and stuck with BT for broadband and landlines. O2, which started off at BT when I worked for them, is now owned by Spain’s Telefonica.

The BBC posted this at midnight last night, after spending most of yesterday at the top of Techmeme :

The agreement with O2 is reported to include Apple receiving a continuing share of the revenue generated for the network operator. The handsets are expected to be sold for about £300 and O2 will be hoping that the lure of the fashionable phone is enough to win customers from rival networks.

It certainly will — has done in my case — and will be a terrific boost to lacklustre O2.

I’ve been watching the hysteria around the iPhone in the states, and read so many reviews of it through the usual suspects, it would be hard to ignore the tiny beast when it arrives. And £300 is only $600, a smallish premium on the U.S. price. Normally, we can expect to pay double.

I wonder though why we have to be so far behind America in these launches?

Update: The Register has just published a piece claiming that the components in the 8Gb iPhone cost $220. That makes the expected UK price of $600 pretty fair taking everything into account. The $220 doesn’t include the cost of assembly, shipping, marketing, or the price of the software that makes the iPhone work. Clearly Apple is relying on lifetime revenues from O2, and sales of other media to make its fortune with this gadget.

Update 2: Bob Cringely is now reporting, “It is my understanding that Apple and AT&T are planning a fall rollout for full 3G iPhone service.” Let’s hope O2 is up to speed on that one.