radio etc.

I've thought of something like your exercise before, but for other purposes. There's that game we used to play where you say or write one sentence of the story. Well, with the advent of wikipedia and other things, journalists tried to use it to do citizen journalism. They tried to have citizens edit and alter stories based on their new information and situations in the community. Didn't work too well. Going along with that, I've often thought that would be fun to do a novel like that on the web. A web story that is created by multiple people. That way the story if very unexpected and different, more unique than any story by a single author ever could be. You would still have to moderate it and make tasteful edits for morality, continuity, etc, but it could be a very unique creation. However, that is a different future idea altogether.

I also agree with the doing whatever we want. having had the desire to write successful novels from time to time, I've also struggled with the notion that it has to appeal to the largest audience possible. Let's be honest, publishers, movie companies and the like are all interested in the really big ideas that will go far. Ok, so some times you wonder "who in the world put this idea together and what were they thinking?" But generally it works that way. I also agree that the internet kind of solves some of that problem. In the print industry, newspapers are dying because people can go to the internet. Magazines have still retained a small foothold because they are niche industries. That's largely how the internet works, too. You only need a niche and you can get an audience a lot of the time.
Perhaps I should've used the ramble alert.