The following thought was inspired by a spate of bookmarklets and address bar shortcuts that have been recently generated for del.icio.us. The tipper was Ryan Tomayko's del.icio.us address-barlets and more importantly, his argument about muscle memory setting in.
Newspaper organizations should think of constantly providing boomarklets and address bar shortcuts as a service that ties local information to muscle memory. Advantages abound. Builds loyalty, or lockin if you prefer. You can get more information about users out of their bookmarklet choices and usage. Heck they can be custom generated. They're not malware and ridiculously easy to install (bookmarklets) and explain (address bar shortcuts). Developing them isn't even all that hard.
As of now, news organizations are completely ceding this opportunity to Web application developers e.g.: MSN, Yahoo, Google.
The tricky bit is to come up with services that users would want to routinely use. Coupon or classified lookup for comparison purposes anyone? There's gotta be something weather related in there. Arts and entertainment possibly.
Of course, online news sites would have to consider themselves also in the service building business, as opposed to just the content delivery business.
Just a thought.