Mark "Santa" Thompson has done his first round of sharing the public service toys around the industry – and it would be very cynical not to welcome it as exactly the sort of thing the BBC should be doing. The BBC's own current blogger-in-residence, Steve Bowbrick, gave a good account of what might be possible on his blog six months ago.

Interestingly we have also had a wish list for Mr Thompson for some time (not just for ourselves but for the whole of the industry). Some of this has been hinted at in yesterday's proposals, such as the ability for local news services to take raw BBC video material if it wishes (although why stop at this and why not make BBC packages embeddable is puzzling).

Another thing that would benefit converging publishers is a recognition that as the content is paid for by the public it should be available publicly and hyper distributed. All platforms open, all content free is perhaps too idealistic - but then so was "Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation".

The BBC dropping charges for TV listings is a baby step and a welcome one which – ahem – ITV should follow. But, in a web oriented world, what about access to the BBC's programme database in open APIs with all that lovely metadata exposed to the world? This would certainly make our technology director and many others like him extremely happy. It would also have the further benefit of making available the BBC archive to everybody who can then work on it gratis to present it in a more beneficial way.

Ditto your news footage. It should really be on an open server where people who want to take the news and distribute it through any channel necessary can. Of course it would carry BBC branding and it can come with any conditions you like attached, around re-use, or sale, or cutting, or even advertising. But it would be enriching for the users and publishers to have such a marvellous resource available.

Then there is the aggregational power of the BBC. How depressing to find the BBC loitering below Google Australia as a referrer of traffic to news stories on theguardian.com. If the BBC leads the way in linking it will be a lesson for all of us to follow – and who knows the BBC could even benefit. Link out, link out, link out.

How many people do the BBC now have dedicated to sifting through user generated content? And how many people do the BBC have sourcing the best external links and adding them to contextualised content? Surely pointing to the best of what is out there is just as valuable – if not more so than trying to hoover the world for snippets the BBC can silo.

Obviously we have sad faces about the BBC trialling iPlayer content with the Telegraph Media Group. Not least because we have been asking – nay begging the Beeb – to consider embeddable video news for what seems like an age. But if the trials for participation are open to all, then why not?

Giving us an embeddable iPlayer might be a start. But there is so much more the corporation can and should do with its content, code and skills, which will make it a more indispensable part of the media landscape and less of a competitive ogre.