“How did your son get to be the Naked Cowboy?” the keynote speaker asked.

“Well, it wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen overnight,” Kenny Burck replied. “My wife and I did not set out to raise a Naked Cowboy. . . .”

I’d also settle for a cross between Hoosiers and Showgirls.

Faced with complaints from photographers and tourists alike, the NYPD has issued a department order reminding cops that the right to take pictures in the Big Apple is as American as apple pie.

“Photography and the videotaping of public places, buildings and structures are common activities within New York City . . . and is rarely unlawful,” the NYPD operations order begins.

It acknowledges that the city is a terrorist target, but since it’s a prominent “tourist destination, practically all such photography will have no connection to terrorism or unlawful conduct.”

. . .

But cops are not without successes in confronting what might appear to be innocent videotaping.

In Manhattan, cops spotted a man — who turned out to have ties to a terror group in Pakistan — videotaping the underbellies of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.

They did? When exactly was that?

*Finally exonerating Woody Allen thirty years after the fact.

An Ohio choirgirl got a big city thrill Friday when she became the 1 millionth person to visit Ground Zero’s tribute museum.

Shaique Gamble stepped over the threshold of the Liberty St. visitor center shortly after 10 a.m. and cheers rang out.

“It was kind of funny and shocking at the same time,” said the 16-year-old, who was wide-eyed but all smiles at the surprise welcome.

“I just expected to come and take a tour and then this happened.”

The Hotel Carter was named the dirtiest hotel in America Tuesday by TripAdvisor.com, marking the third time in four years that the W. 43rd St. dump has topped the list.

. . .

The hotel, used as a homeless shelter in the 1980s, gained infamy two years ago when a cleaning lady found a woman’s corpse stuffed under a bed.

A 17th-floor room rented by the Daily News was thankfully corpse-free. And while it was small and sparsely appointed, it wasn’t dirty. The bathroom was nearly spotless and the bed linens unstained.

The room’s most serious flaw was a lone picture frame, covered in a substance one can only hope was mildew. In the hallway outside, a garbage bag filled with used tissues, lay open on the dark-green carpet.

The hotel’s wretched reputation wasn’t news to one worker.

“Just Google ‘Carter and bed bugs.’ You’ll read all about it,” she said. “Roaches, bugs — you’ll find everything inside here.”

Hotel manager Erwin Lumanglas brushed aside its reputation.

“We are not bothered at all,” Lumanglas said. “Even when they tell us we’re the dirtiest hotel in the world, people are still interested in coming because of the price and the location.”

Location Scout: Hotel Carter.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a blog entry on the official Google blog announcing a partnership with the Internet’s most important company to unveil a new city tourism site: nycgo.com.

Launched yesterday, the site “is the official resource on the web for all there is to see, do and experience in the City,” the mayor wrote. It features listings of events, dining, and entertainment recommendations. The site will be managed by NYC & Company, New York City’s official marketing, tourism and partnership organization.

Google chipped in with their Google Maps and Google Earth applications. Users can find recommended destinations from famous New Yorkers with the “Just Ask the Locals” feature (From Cynthia Nixon: “My kids are crazy about Mars 2112″), then get directions and send the info to their phones with Google Maps for mobile. Other partners like Travelocity will offer discounts and deals. Media outlets, including Time Out New York, Paper and, well, we here at The New York Observer, have partnered with the city to offer some of their favorite destinations.

Not only does New York have about 60 gazillion guidebooks already devoted to it but there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of web content about it, either. So yeah, maybe it is duplicative for the city to reinvent Fodor’s but hey, then you might not have learned about Mars 2112 . . .

And you wonder why we’re in debt.

Google’s technological expertise helped turn New York City’s main visitor center from a place to collect brochures into an interactive hub for planning a day — or a week — in the city. But the related Web site — NYCGo — proved so popular that it crashed almost as soon as it was unveiled and continued to operate slowly through Wednesday afternoon.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other city officials showed off the Official NYC Information Center, at 810 Seventh Avenue and West 53rd Street in Midtown, on Wednesday morning. At a cost of $1.8 million in private financing, the center was outfitted with video tabletop touch-screens equipped with Google Maps that allow users to assemble itineraries.

Mr. Bloomberg emphasized that the center was not just for tourists. “By extending these new travel resources to our residents, we are giving New Yorkers the chance to more actively take advantage of the city’s diverse and exciting neighborhoods,” he said.

The city’s tourism-promotion arm, NYC & Company, also officially unveiled a revamped Web site, linked to Travelocity’s reservations system, so that prospective visitors can immediately purchase airline tickets or hotel rooms.

Apparently NYC & Company gets 40% of its financing — and the obvious official stamp of approval — from the city. So it seems not kind of but actually really fishy that the Maps section of the site features the “7 Karaoke Bars Worth Singing About”, for example, with detailed directions how to get to each one. If I were a competing karaoke bar owner, I’d be pissed. Or a hotelier. Or a restauranteur. Or the proprietor of an “environmentally conscious watering hole” that wasn’t picked by the site’s editors. Or anyone who could benefit from the use of taxpayer money to stir up business.

[W]ith revenues tight and tourist dollars desperately needed, the Bloomberg administration has created a 24,000-square-foot wedding palace, in the hope of increasing the number of couples who marry at the city clerk’s office.

“We want to be the wedding destination of the world,” said First Deputy Mayor Patricia E. Harris.

And it’s not just the $25 wedding fee the city is selling. Forget the wedding band? No problem. The new bureau offers an elastic faux-diamond band for $9. No flowers?

They are available as well — $4 to $7 for a single stem and $25 to $50 for a bridal bouquet. There is also hairspray ($4), disposable digital cameras ($16.25) and tissues, at $1.75 a pack, for the weepy types.

The $12 million project, overseen by the designer Jamie Drake, who did Madonna’s Los Angeles home and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house, involved the renovation of an old Department of Motor Vehicles office up the street from City Hall.

Mr. Drake created two separate wedding chapels off the building’s central rotunda. In the east chapel, the sofa and walls feature apricot and peach colors; the west chapel is done in purple and lavender. Each chapel has an abstract painting that matches the walls and hangs next to the lectern from where the clerk performs the ceremonies.

Nearby bathrooms were turned into expansive dressing rooms, with full-length mirrors and long vanity counters lit by the soft hue of recessed wall fixtures.

The city has even set up an oversize photograph of City Hall to be used as a backdrop for pictures.

Bloomberg administration officials declined to estimate how much money the weddings would generate. But the city’s marketing agency, NYC & Company, has already struck a partnership with TheKnot.com, a Web-based wedding clearinghouse, to create travel packages that would include a ceremony at the bureau followed by a weekend in a hotel.

“I have a warning for Las Vegas: You better watch out,” said Carley Roney, founder of TheKnot.com. “With these new digs, there might just be a new world wedding capital.”

Those flocks of tourists clogging Manhattan streets were thicker than ever this year, but the sinking economy will mean fewer visitors in 2009, officials said Monday.

The city estimates a record 47 million people visited New York this year and spent a record $30 billion, Mayor Bloomberg said.

“We do predict that there’ll be a single-digit decline, and no more than that, for certain,” said George Fertitta, head of NYC & Company.

*Whoops . . . be careful what you wish for!

Out of the myriad and random tenants that fill the Empire State Building, there is one that seems both perfectly situated, yet jarringly out of place.

It is the King’s College, an evangelical Christian school that is all but hidden in plain sight, occupying three of the building’s floors — two of them subterranean — since 1999. On the one hand, it seems apt that a school claiming close adherence to God’s word would occupy New York’s tallest skyscraper.

On the other hand, most of the college’s 258 students are politically and economically conservative, opposed to abortion and generally against gay marriage, drunkenness and premarital sex. The polar opposites, in other words, of the kind of boozing, godless, kick-up-your-heels, bed-hopping liberals that Manhattan supposedly draws.

Which raises a question: What is an evangelical Christian college doing in the middle of New York?

Location Scout: Empire State Building.

Authorities say a resident of the Netherlands who came to New York as a “graffiti tourist” has been indicted on charges of spray painting a subway car and leading police on a dangerous chase.

Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown said Thursday that 23-year-old Robbert Boxem of Zwolle, Netherlands — who uses the graffiti tag “KRAE” — faces charges including criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. If convicted, he could get up to four years in prison.

Part of the police chase occurred on subway tracks.

Brown says it’s believed Boxem, who was arrested on Sept. 9, came to New York for an international graffiti event known as Meeting of Styles.

The tourism board luvs u in the Bronx!