Live, from New York, it’s Condé Nast Traveler!

$CNTraveler Readers\' Choice Awards$ Yes, the annual Condé Nast Traveler 2008 Readers’ Choice Awards will be coming to you live from their big awards ceremony on the evening of October 15, because I’m going to be there to “live-tweet” the event on my Twitter stream.

That woman in evening attire at the New York Public Library XYZ swanky Manhattan venue (details to follow on ceremony location) who is supersonically typing on her laptop? That will be me.

Hopefully my Merlot and crudités won’t get dumped onto the keyboard.

I’ll be sending up-to-the-minute accounts of who won which award for hotels, cruise lines, airlines, islands and cities across the globe. I’ll tell you how the crowd is reacting, what the award winners say and any other fun tidbits that come across my radar.

Over 30,000 people vote in this survey, and I also plan to write a blog post about the woman behind the questions and the methodology used to determine the winners. This isn’t that guy who won a fake wine award; this is a carefully vetted process with input from savvy readers.

Last year, for example, the readers of the magazine and Web site chose Sydney, Australia as their favorite city worldwide, and San Francisco as their favorite US city. Here’s some more of the 2007 list on BootsnAll’s Business Travel Logue.

I plan to do as many on-the-fly interviews as I can, with a focus on two areas:

The magazine is pretty upscale, and you know that’s not how I travel. How can a budget-minded person, especially with kids, take advantage of the companies and properties that are chosen as winners? Is there room for us at the Gucci table? I think there is, Wendy has convinced me that there is, and I’m going to find out how for you.
I’d like to know what the high-scoring companies are doing to establish a presence on the Web in social media. Do they blog? Are they on Twitter? Facebook? Are their personnel on LinkedIn? How do they reach out to customers in a Web 2.0 manner?

I’m actually not the first to live-tweet for Traveler — that honor goes to my friend and fellow travel blogger Pam Mandel of Nerd’s Eye View, who did a fabulous job of live-tweeting the recent World Savers Congress (here are most of the posts that everyone tweeted to cover that event, so you can see what it looks like.)

See you in New York in October….