From intellectual discourse to pets to baking to scientific instruction to school materials, here are five new websites that take the technical concepts behind popular social community websites YouTube, MySpace, and FaceBook, and apply them instead to specific areas of interest. Most of the websites I’ve featured here on my blog before (Fuzzster is new), but gathered here together and we see a new trend towards taking the most revolutionary online ideas, currently under mob rule, and focusing them towards a specific purpose for more substance.

BakeSpace.com

The closest I've ever come to being a cook was the time I made muffins on Canada AM, so I'm not the person to pass any judgment on BakeSpace, a new social community website designed for those who like to cook and are interested in connecting with others who share the passion and want to exchange recipes and tips. In fact the main focus seems to be on sharing recipes of which there's plenty. With free registration you can create your own "virtual kitchen", upload photos and video clips, create a blog for your thoughts, and exchange instant messages with baking friends.

Fuzzster.com

Fuzzster is a “FaceBook” for pets. Here you can create a “family” of profiles, one for each of your pets and one for yourself as “parent”. For each pet you can upload a photo, add personal details such as favorite snacks, activities or tricks, and add other pets on the network as “friends”. Much like FaceBook, you can update each your profiles with photo albums and a blog detailing the adventures of your fuzzy one for your fuzzster friends to read. They in turn can post comments, both on your photos and on your main profile wall.

ScienceHack.com

Science Hack is my kind of search engine. It is specifically designed to find videos from online web communities such as YouTube or MetaCafe that showcase science experiments in action, like the Flamming Gummy Bear experiment (pictured). Founder Rami Nassar of Halifax, Nova Scotia says that each and every video included in their results has been screened for scientific accuracy by a panel of qualified scientists. The website is currently a work in progress and in addition to allowing you sort through their growing video collection by keyword, the online staff are busy indexing their videos by subject too and so far have created sections for Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Space, Green Energy, and Mathematics.

FORA.tv

I love YouTube. It is revolutionary, interesting, amusing, clever, and it's community offers incredible insights into internet culture, but a source of intellectual discourse it is not. FORA TV is a new website that hopes to fulfill that overlooked need. The video sharing community is built for footage from debates, discussions, and talks held at a wide range of academic and private institutions. Covering a full range of thoughtful subjects, including business, education, science, religion, and technology. You'll find discussions by Norman Mailer, the founders of Google, British actress Brenda Blethyn and professors from across the world. Although most of the videos are sent in either by event organizers or freelance journalists, anyone with a camcorder is free to submit of clip for consideration (but unlike YouTube, you might get rejected). In addition to categorizing the clips by subject, you can also sift through them by world region or by institution. The FORA player includes options for attached transcripts, speaker biographies, and downloads that includes just the audio from the clips or the videos in either iPod or PlayStation Portable format. And, you can embed videos from the site into your blog or website.

TeacherTube.com

As the name implies, Teacher Tube is a "YouTube" for educators and students. It is a video-sharing community devoted to clips that showcase lessons, school events, and student projects. Not only are the clips searchable by keyword and divided into channels by subject, but schools and individual teachers can create their own channels for their content. All the clips can be rated and commented on by viewers, and each clip comes with embed codes in case you want to insert it into your own website or blog. The service is free with registration, and that includes access to download the clips for your computer or Pod Video.