Media Perspective: An openness at the BBC has fuelled UK digital development.(British Broadcasting Corp.)

The BBC doesn't seem to crop up much in marketing land, unless you're doing some advertising for them, or cursing them for stealing eyeballs that could be gazing at your lovely ads. Yet it has profoundly affected the media landscape that we all work in and the culture that we all inhabit, and it is a crucial part of what makes the UK such a unique and interesting digital media landscape.

Its resources, willingness to experiment and ability to think long-term has created a generation of digital media innovators that's enriching Britain's commercial oomph as they pile out of the Beeb to make more money and escape the bureaucracy. More importantly, though, it seems to have acquired a habit for openness that means all sorts of great thinking has spilled out of the BBC and on to the web, and we can all plunder it.

My favourite example is a brief document called The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles (just google that phrase and you'll find it). If you're doing any kind of online activity, you could do a lot worse than just nicking, I mean, building on, it.

It's splendid guidance for even the most commercial web project, because the BBC's public-service mission seems to chime with the utility and openness that the web demands. Which is a way of saying it is more likely to spot the right thing to do than many of us, but we can learn from it.

Take, for example, Principle Five: 'Treat the entire web as a creative ...