11.30.2005 ET

(CSRwire) San Francisco (November 30, 2005)--SustainLane www.sustainlane.com, the Web's best community resource for sustainable and healthy living announced today that Warren Karlenzig, director of the SustainLane US City Rankings, will participate Thursday through Sunday as an expert in what is expected to be the world's largest online forum, Habitat JAM.

The Habitat JAM will be www.habitatjam.com/ a revolutionary form of democratic discussion on urgent urban issues in preparation for the World Urban Forum, to be held in Vancouver in June 2006.

"I look forward to the challenge of jamming for history with tens of thousands around the world who have an interest in bettering cities and the lives of their inhabitants," said Karlenzig. "It's about time the internet delivers on its promise of radically transforming lives, whether it is through the way we work or the way people in cities live and the quality of life they experience."

Karlenzig, Chief Strategy Officer of SustainLane, directed the SustainLane 2005 US City Rankings, the first study benchmarking U.S. city sustainability, which is available for free online at: http://www.sustainlane.com/cityindex/citypage/ranking/. SustainLane presented awards in June for the top ten cities in the study during the UN's World Environment Day activities in San Francisco. Five mayors and four city sustainability directors accepted awards at the event http://www.sustainlane.com/page.php?id=51.

Estimates of participants in the Habitat JAM forum, which is open to the public at habitjam.com, range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Six simultaneous forums will be held beginning at 7 a.m. Pacific Time Thursday through 7 a.m. Sunday, December 4. Forums will be held on "Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers", "Sustainable Access to Water", "Environmental Sustainability", "Safety and Security", "Finance and Government", and "Humanity: The Future of Our Cities".

The technology for the Jam was developed by IBM (NYSE: IBM), which provided for the event a combination of hardware, software and services valued at about $3 million, according to Mike Maloney, Corporate Media Relations Manager.

"It's the first time the jam technology has been used outside of IBM's firewall," Maloney said. He said IBM coined the "jam" term based on the improvisation enabled by the technology. "It's like jazz collaboration, with people building on other people's ideas in a structured format." Maloney said that IBM has hosted as many as 60,000 internal users on the jam technology. The company had 2.3 million page views during one 2004 event, which generated tens of thousands of ideas that were winnowed down to 65 ideas through natural language technology and voting.

"Jams are a blend of technology and kind of a grassroots discussion of ideas," Maloney said. The Habitat Jam will also feature physical forums so people in areas that lack computers and the internet, such as Lagos, Nigeria, are able to participate in the forum.

IBM's Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation Irving Wladawsky-Berger has a blog site devoted to explaining the Jam technology: http://irvingwb.typepad.com/blog/2005/11/tapping_into_th_1.html.

Jam forums on Environmental Sustainability will be guided by Karlenzig and 150 international subject matter experts, as well as by moderators such as architect and author William McDonough.

About SustainLane

SustainLane.com is a non-partisan San Francisco internet community resource for healthy and sustainable living, providing people with easily accessible knowledge categorized as it relates to their lives. Launched in June, SustainLane.com (www.sustainlane.com) is fast becoming the trusted single-point Internet media destination for education, resources, and community as people turn to SustainLane.com to cut through the overwhelming, non-categorized data available through generic search engines like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). SustainLane.com's target users are the influential LOHAS audience (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability: a $238+ billion market annually) who desire a focused horizontal search and affiliation community based on their precise needs, versus generic horizontal search and/or broad online communities such as Yahoo (NASDAQ: YAHOO). SustainLane.com's goal: to inspire and enable people to live better now.

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