Reports of the iPhone’s imminent arrival in Washington appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

Jordan Golson of the Industry Standard has debunked a report last week by TheHill.com suggesting that the U.S. House of Representatives was seriously considering switching its mobile computer of choice from the BlackBerry to the iPhone based on strong demand. Golson followed up with Jeff Ventura, director of communications for the Chief Administrative Officer of the House, and Ventura said that the CAO is merely testing a small number of iPhones to see how they might fit into the organization.

That’s not exactly how the story unfolded last week, as dozens of news sources–including yours truly, unfortunately–ran with TheHill.com’s report that the iPhone was under serious consideration by the House. As often happens in these situations, the report quickly turned into a game of blogger telephone–with further amplification as it was passed around the Internet until much of the Apple community believed that Congress was set to become an iPhone shop at the start of the next congressional term in January.

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Jordan Golson can’t be happy: Nick Denton has cut the amount of money he gets per thousand page views to $6.50 from $9.75. That’s a 33% pay cut, on a per-page-view basis. What about on an absolute basis?

Well, the page-view rate is set on the basis of the previous quarter’s page views. Total Q4 page views were 9,132,723, while Q1 page views rose 34% to 12,234,604 . The 33% cut matches the 34% rise in page views, right? Er, no.

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“Jericho,” CBS’s excellent postapocalyptic drama set in rural Kansas has been canceled. Again. “Jericho” drew a large following among the tech demo. Besides the obvious sci-fi draw, Jericho explored themes of government intervention and self-sufficiency, which are passionate topics among the more tinfoil-hat Libertarians of the Web. But shows that please Netizens aren’t moneymakers.

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A few weeks ago, we wrote a story about humorous headline aggregator Fark.com. That story was then submitted to Digg. Partially as a joke and partially to see what would happen, Fark.com founder Drew Curtis linked to the Digg post, rather than to the original story.

By sending thousands of his readers to the Digg page, Curtis singlehandedly pushed the story to Digg’s homepage. Success! Instant traffic and a new grill for me. So, is there any way Digg can account for this? Not easily. It’s difficult to tell “authentic” Diggs from “gamed” Diggs, when you have thousands of readers showing up at a page out of the blue.

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