What/where is the best online public video conference community? And camera question.

Hey anyone out there if there has been a developement in online public video conference chats/communities?
What software/web/internet.... free/or_not is there do find people that have really fast broadband connections
where you can do public conferences with strangers just to chat. I know microsoft netmeeting started towards this many years ago but it wasn't
quite right for finding people to chat with in a 2-5 person size converence and it was ahead of
its time too. My connection varies about 3-8 megabits up&down so I'm wondering where things
are happening as far as the best with video chat today. Also does anyone know if the logitech
quickcam messenger is any different in audio/video compard to the logitech quickcam pro 4000?
I would like to have a real video camera with firewire and a capture card to do the video but I don't
think I would spend that much money and I don't think any company makes a plain video
camera that outputs video that isn't a video recorder for protable use with tapes and discs etc.
If anyone knows of a video motion&still camera like that, that uses firewire to output video (not data to
be converted to video using a cpu) and what type of firewire card would be used I would like
to know. I assume that a REAL video camera that does the video genertion etc. inside the camera
will not do dropped frames and will look extremely better than a "webcam" that offloads the
computing to the computer its plugged into.