A huge part of American culture is the divide between the “cool” and the “uncool”: the “jock” and the “nerd”. SXSW proves that the two spheres of the Venn Diagram we use to talk about these disparate groups intersects quite often, and the sliver in between could easily be labeled “web 2.0 developer”.

I have to say Austin seems like a great town. I’ve been well-fed and well-beered since we arrived, with tons of interesting things to do and see all within an eight block radius. The locals seem friendly, the weather is great and the shower in my hotel blasts hot water for as long as I want it. The culture in the hallways is why we’re here though, and it’s here in droves. The chatter in the entranceways and halls is all next-gen tech and programming languages, occasionally interrupted by someone stepping away to Twitter their whereabouts to the big screens. Crumpler and Timbuk2 bags abound, and indie rock plays before, after and in between the panels. Throngs of fans descend on speakers after each panel for advice, photos and book singings.

In other words, the nerds are running the high school.

Part of me is quite happy here, the part that used to stay up late writing HTML and watching Conan O’Brien, the part that loves Yo La Tengo. But part of me feels outclassed and outgunned, having my head filled with fantastic ideas and notions that my company could never get used to or find a use for. In that way it makes me push harder to build my own app, finally launch it and feel as though I have something to contribute here rather than passively consuming. Until then, a conference like this only serves to confirm my suspicions: that I’m on the right track, that agility is key, that in-house sales forces are a detriment to selling a good app.

Something that did give me hope was yesterday’s panel on design entitled “Learning Interaction Design From Las Vegas” with Dan Saffer from Adaptive Path. Saffer began his panel by quoting Bergson — “Disorder is only an order that we cannot see.” — and proceeded to site examples where the designers of the Las Vegas strip experience showed their innate understanding of UX. Among their triumphs are multi-use design, careful adherence to use cases and user personas, and tiered functionality. They’ve cornered the market on making silk purses out of the twin sow ears of wanton consumption and unbridled avarice. Sort of like making vertical sites with loads of add positions.

I can do this after all. Maybe.