From the Sunday Times’ news story on the civil-war-ness of things in Iraq comes this quotation:

“I don’t think we moved too quickly, General [William B.] Caldwell said of putting the Iraqis in charge of Baghdad. “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the sectarian violence.”

I am no doubt showing my age here, but each time the Bush administration and its related entities (Caldwell is the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, so technically he’s not part of the administration, but that line is pretty blurry today) trot out this particular line, all I can hear is the mad voice of Monty Python cackling, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

No one expected the looting in Iraq. No one expected the insurgency. No one expected that we would never find the weapons of mass destruction. No one expected that Iraq would be so hard to rebuild. No one expected the Sunnis and the Shiites to not get along. No one “could have anticipated the sectarian violence.”

It is time for the Bush administration and its people to retire this excuse, which played out so infamously with Hurricane Katrina as well — not simply because it represents a species of buck-passing that ought to be beneath the people who run our government and our military, but also because in every case it is untrue, and, at this late stage in the unfolding Iraq fiasco, it serves as an egregiously self-incriminating lie.

The prospect of Iraq descending into civil war is one that has loomed over Bush’s invasion from well before its start. The “anticipation” of such a conflict has been a constant theme among observers on the scene and armchair commentators alike. For a U.S. general on the ground in Iraq today to claim that nobody anticipated “sectarian violence” is a sign of delusional incompetence — and an indication that reality continues to be alien terrain for the people leading our war effort.

…for the next two days, taking the kids camping (their first time), tent and all. But not far from friends and good food.

Late last night I clicked on a link to the new Business Week cover story about Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose, and read the cover’s headline: “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.” Gee, I thought, bleary-eyed, I guess I missed the story about how they sold the company. Good for them.

This morning I started reading the piece, and, after scanning quickly through it hunting for the graph about how Digg had sold out and to whom, realized that the $60 million figure was not the proceeds from a sale, and not even a valuation that a prospective buyer had offered, but an almost entirely fictional number.

Was it something that some irresponsible coverline writer had slapped on the piece, that the responsible writer was horrified to see? I don’t think so. The second paragraph of the article, referring to a recent redesign of the Digg site, reads: “At 29, Rose was on his way either to a cool $60 million or to total failure.”

The $60 million number is never explained in the piece; the only real numbers are contained in this sentence: “So far, Digg is breaking even on an estimated $3 million annually in revenues. Nonetheless, people in the know say Digg is easily worth $200 million.” Elsewhere the article says Rose owns 30 to 40 percent of the company. Hence, $60 million.

There is a word for this kind of business journalism, and it is: awful. The reader has no idea who these “people in the know” are; they could easily be people associated with the company who have an interest in inflating its worth.

There’s no question that Digg is a successful site that might be on its way to building a real business. It might be worth more than $200 million someday. I’m not slighting them in any way; I’ve been visiting the site almost since it started. But plastering imaginary dollar figures on its forehead is not the way to help Rose and his colleagues build a real business. “On paper” means just that. “People in the know” can say whatever they want, but your business, like your house, is only worth what someone is actually willing to pay for it.

The Business Week piece itself acknowledges this in places: “This time around, the entrepreneurs worry that, within a moment, the money — and their projects — could vanish… it’s still only paper wealth, which [Rose] and many others have learned can evaporate.”

Right. So why is Business Week insisting that Rose has made $60 million? If this callow 29-year-old understand that it’s “only paper,” why are the editors of one of our best-known business journals being so stupid about it?

Techdirt calls the article “the ultimate Web 2.0 hype piece,” but I think it’s not even that up to date; it’s the same old dotcom-bubble piece dragged from the attic and retrofitted for today’s Web. It is just as mindless about the nature and meaning of company valuations as the dumbest purchaser of TheGlobe.com IPO shares was.

POSTSCRIPT: Jason Fried of 37Signals comes at Business Week from the perspective of a successful entrepreneur who is also a member of the tech industry’s reality-based community.

I have been using Technorati since it was running on servers powered by Dave Sifry’s hamsters, and it remains an essential part of my blogging existence. The company recently rolled out a spiffy new design for its service. Hooray.

But: Why are the results still so…unstable? Since I am the perpetrator of a recent blog-address move I’ve been trying to keep an eye on how many, and which, other bloggers have updated the address that they link to me with. (I know it’s a pain; I’ve been guilty of plenty of blogroll-rot myself, though it’s an easier job keeping it up to date now that I’ve outsourced it to Bloglines’ widget.)

What I’m finding is that, depending on the hour of the day, sometimes I will get a list of results from T-rati that’s reasonably up to date and trustworthy, and sometimes I will get a list that’s just wacky — full of results that just don’t seem to have anything to do with my blog, no links evident, no overlapping subject matter, nothing. Furthermore, the results that I get from the T-rati site sometimes differ significantly from those that turn up in the RSS feed that represents that search.

Is this fallout from the monumental war I know Technorati must be waging on the depredations of blog-spammers and spam-blogs? Is it a symptom of some general structural problem with the service’s design, or just side-effects of the company’s constant scaling-up efforts to keep pace with the blogosphere’s exponential growth?

Or is there some deeper logical pattern hidden within the seemingly irrelevant pages T-rati is claiming point to my blog — some guy’s Nirvana playlist; A non-English-language page with a photo of Andrea Bocelli singing “Besame Mucho”; Debby’s World’s list of “34 things worth knowing” — and if only I could decipher that pattern, I could achieve perfect bliss, or at least a more rarefied Technorati ranking?

Whenever there is an article about software failure, there is a quotation from the venerable CHAOS Report — a survey by a Massachusetts-based consultancy called the Standish Group, first conducted in 1994 and regularly updated since. The CHAOS Report presented dire statistics about the high failure rate of software projects: 31.1 percent of projects cancelled, 52.7 percent “challenged” (completed only way over budget and/or behind schedule), and only 16.2% deemed a success.

There aren’t a whole lot of other statistics out there on this topic, so the numbers from Standish get big play. I used them myself in my book proposal, and returned to the report as I researched the book, interested in finding out more about the methodology the researchers used — and also curious about what “CHAOS” actually stood for: Combinatorial Heuristic Algorithm for the Observation of Software? Combine Honnete Ober Advancer…?

Nope. As far as I could tell, CHAOS is an acronym for nothing at all. I tried to contact Standish for more information by telephone and e-mail but they never responded. It wasn’t essential to my work — there’s only a handful of sentences on the subject in Dreaming in Code — so I didn’t push hard. I thought, maybe this was the sort of consultancy that was only interested in the paying customers.

In the August issue of Communications of the ACM, Robert Glass has a column about Standish and the CHAOS Report that suggests my failure to get a response from this organization was hardly unique.

Several researchers, interested in pursuing the origins of this key data, have contacted Standish and asked for a description of their research process, a summary of their latest findings, and in general a scholarly discussion of the validity of the findings. They raise those issues because most research studies conducted by academic and industry researchers arrive at data largely inconsistent with the Standish findings….
Repeatedly, those researchers who have queried Standish have been rebuffed in their quest….

Glass is a widely known and respected authority on the software development process (I read, and can recommend, his book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering as part of my book research), and the Communications of the ACM is the centerpiece journal of the computing field’s main professional organization. So maybe the Standish group will respond to the plea with which Glass closes his column:

it is important to note that all attempts to contact Standish about this issue, to get to the heart of this critical matter, have been unsuccessful. Here, in this column, I would like to renew that line of inquiry. Standish, please tell us whether the data we have all been quoting for more than a decade really means what some have been saying it means. It is too important a topic to have such a high degree of uncertainty associated with it.

Indeed. The Standish numbers are precisely the sort of statistic that journalists in need of background “facts” — and scholars, too, for that matter — will quote in an endless loop of repetition, like Newsweek’s infamous stats showing that thirtysomething women were more likely to be killed by terrorists than to find husbands. The loop keeps repeating until someone provides a definitive debunking — and even then it doesn’t always stop.

So it’s ironic but hardly surprising to find the same magazine that contains Glass’s complaint also featuring a cover story on “The Changing Software Engineering Paradigm” that parrots the Standish numbers for the umpteenth time.

Windows Vista may not be ready on time after all, says one knowledgeable observer (and another agrees).

But then, it may not matter, because who is going to buy this thing while the bugs are still being squashed? Not I, said the CTO. Not I, said the home user.

Over at Technology Review, in “Homo Conexus,” James Fallows reports the results of a two-week experiment in which he cast off desktop software and cast his lot with a collection of Web-based (”Web 2.0″) applications.

He finds that the new world is best for stuff that’s natural to share: calendars (Google Calendar) and photos (Flickr). The Achilles heel is connectivity: For instance, he uses Writely to compose the article itself and, inevitably, his Net connection drops in the middle, forcing him to reconstruct his work from local backups that he’d cautiously been keeping.

Fallows also senses a “tragic” potential in the essentially trusting (and, he argues, perhaps overly idealistic) framework of the new Web:

Every bit of the Web enterprise operates on trust. Web-based commerce has gone as far as it has because of the surprisingly low level of fraud and error…. all this depends on the basic trust that messages will go through undistorted, unintercepted, and in general unimpeded.

If problems like privacy breaches or indentity theft cause that trust to break down, he suggests, the Web 2.0 era may lose its innocence, along with the trust that keeps so many of its wheels turning.

If you live and breathe this stuff — if you religiously read TechCrunch and store your bookmarks in del.icio.us — then you’re unlikely to learn much new here, or to find Fallows’ sympathetic skepticism very congenial. But for the rest of us, the article is a useful reality check — a reminder that a lot of what early adopters get excited about isn’t yet ready to cause a mainstream stir.