by Paul Jay, CBCNews.ca

Earlier today, Jessica Jackley, one of the founders of micro-lending site Kiva, gave a well-received speech and q and a at the mesh conference in Toronto, and in summing up her achievements, she said:

"I am not wealthy but I think I could retire on happiness."

It was a statement made for the Twitterati...memorable, of the moment and, of course, under 140 characters. Sure enough, about half a dozen tweets appeared including the quote and two blogs, including the official Mesh blog, had the quote.

It's one of the interesting meta-experiences of being at Mesh and in particular 'covering it': there is little distinction between participant, observer and presenter, and for them all, Twitter is the tool of choice.

This has had an interesting side effect, says Mesh blogger Mark Evans: the person asking a question with a microphone is a dying breed;

As he wrote: "Twitter could kill the people asking questions at conferences. After announcing we would take questions via Twitter, using the hashtag #askmesh, there were few question from the audience during Masnick’s keynote."