Coming a day after news of AIM Pages comes word that MySpace launches “myspaceim”. AIM Pages better launch soon, and see some major participation.

Speaking of needing participation, Nick Carr recently pieced together the real new economy emerging from participatory media:

I fear that to view the attention economy as “more than just a subset of the financial economy” is to misread it, to project on it a yearning for an escape (if only a temporary one) from the consumer culture. There’s no such escape online. When we communicate to promote ourselves, to gain attention, all we are doing is turning ourselves into goods and our communications into advertising. We become salesmen of ourselves, hucksters of the “I.” In peddling our interests, moreover, we also peddle the commodities that give those interests form: songs, videos, and other saleable products. And in tying our interests to our identities, we give marketers the information they need to control those interests and, in the end, those identities. Karp’s wrong to say that MySpace is resistant to advertising. MySpace is nothing but advertising.

…Far from existing outside the financial economy, the online attention economy is its fulfillment, its perfection. It’s the place where marketing ceases to be marketing and becomes life.

This was his reply to Scott Karp’s thought provoking take on the question : “what if no one will pay for content?”:

In media 1.0, brands paid for the attention that media companies gathered by offering people news and entertainment (e.g. TV) in exchange for their attention. In media 2.0, people are more likely to give their attention in exchange for OTHER PEOPLE’S ATTENTION.

Karp wonders who will get paid when the interMEDIAries are gone. It’s a good question. I think Nick Carr shared something close to an answer.