The best stories have always been those with universal, timeless applicability. It should be no surprise, then, that I'm about to use one of my favorite old fables to illustrate a trend in the information superhighway of the 21st century. Right?

The story "Stone Soup" is a legend of a persuasive peddler who suckers the residents of a village to contribute scraps of food to his magical stone soup. He then uses the tasty broth to attract villagers near his wagon of wares and sells them out.

Much the same sort of tactic is being employed by some of the most successful electronic peddlers on the Web. These entrepreneurs entice surfers with a shared area of interest to build online communities at their URLs. The community members, themselves, build the community by posting messages to online conversations, creating and responding to special interest surveys, adding pages or entire sections to the site, and adding events of interest to calendars for all to see. The founder of the community then benefits from the resulting traffic by selling their goods and services to these unwary surfers.

Now there's a set of software tools called TownSmith that allows a wide variety of adventurous business people to quickly and efficiently start a web community in a vertical market without an Amazonian bank account. There's certainly no doubt that we will see an increasing amount of stone soup being served up on the Net.

My version of the Stone Soup fable follows for your enjoyment.

Once upon a time, there was a great draught-caused famine. The people were not poor, but they had very little to eat so they jealously hoarded whatever food they could find, hiding it even from their friends and neighbors. One day a peddler drove his wagon into a village, sold a few of his wares, and began asking questions as if he planned to stay for the night.

"There's not a bite to eat in the whole province," he was told. "Better keep moving on."

"Oh, I have everything I need," he said. "In fact, I was thinking of making some stone soup to share with all of you." He pulled an iron cauldron from his wagon, filled it with water, and built a fire under it. Then, with great ceremony, he drew an ordinary-looking stone from a velvet bag and dropped it into the water.

By now, hearing the rumor of food, most of the villagers had come to the square or watched from their windows. As the peddler sniffed the "broth" and licked his lips in anticipation, hunger began to overcome their skepticism.

"Ahh," the peddler said to himself rather loudly, "I do like a tasty stone soup. Of course, stone soup with CABBAGE — that's hard to beat."

Soon a villager approached hesitantly, holding a cabbage he'd retrieved from its hiding place, and added it to the pot. "Capital!" cried the peddler. "You know, I once had stone soup with cabbage and a bit of salt beef as well, and it was fit for a king."

The village butcher managed to find some salt beef...and so it went, through potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on, until there was indeed a delicious meal for all. The villagers offered the peddler a great deal of money for the magic stone, but he refused to sell it. He did, however, manage to sell all his wares and traveled on the next day with an empty wagon and full pockets. And the villagers from that time on, long after the famine had ended, reminisced about the finest soup they'd ever had.

—Wade Nichols

Wade Nichols is Chief Operations Officer of Seine Systems, Incorporated, the Internet software development firm that developed the TownSmith software mentioned in the article. He also acts as the Director of Marketing and Sales for the TownSmith product.