David Eaves has created a Facebook Group aimed at getting 100,000 Canadians to opt out of receiving those tree-killing, energy-burning, shelf-space-taking-up tomes known as the Yellow Pages.

You get them on your doorstep every year, whether you’ve asked for them or not. They’re possibly the world’s biggest piece of physical spam (in the unsolicited marketing sense).

And for a growing number of people, they’re useless, because an online search is easier, faster and – if you’re using a service like Yelp – social, drawing on recommendations from your personal network.

The only way to stop receiving the Yellow Pages is via their opt-out web service. It only takes a minute, and you’ll be free of them for the next two years. In support of Dave’s campaign, I whipped up this cartoon on my iPhone. Feel free to share and repost (and if you wanted to include a credit to me, that would be ducky).

By the way, if you’re American, that opt-out link won’t work for you… but you may find this list of contact info useful.

Last week saw much gnashing of clothes and rending of teeth over the fact that Nike (which is not a World Cup sponsor) is outdoing Adidas (which is) in Twitter mentions, blog references and a few other social media metrics.

Nike isn’t alone. Coke is beating out sponsor Pepsi in level of assocation with the World Cup, and Visa is knocking the stuffing out of sponsor MasterCard.

This is sometimes called ambush marketing: a company that isn’t sponsoring an event takes the initiative to somehow associate itself with it anyway.

And if you believe folks like FIFA or the International Olympic Committee, it’s basically theft: stealing the goodwill around an event, bought and paid for by others, and taking it for your own.

But is that really what’s happening here?

One key implication of that argument is that an organization like FIFA or the IOC can sell – not just the right to put their logo on your brand’s packaging, or to describe your company as an official sponsor – but something much bigger.

They are, in a very real way, claiming the right to sell the conversation around their event. You want your business to participate in that conversation? Fork over a big chunk of cash or find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit (or at least a C & D letter).

And implicit in that claim is the idea that the conversation is theirs to sell in the first place.

But if the past decade of revolution in the social web and networked conversation has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t – can’t – and, indeed, mustn’t – own that conversation. Your users, members, customers, audience – whatever you want to call them – they own the conversation.

If they want to have that conversation with the event convenors and sponsors, wonderful. But the more mind-share an event has managed to gain, the better the chances the audience will also want to have that conversation with others, and that includes competing brands and businesses.

(By the way, I’m not talking about things like sneaking a logo into an event, or using misleading language to imply a sponsorship. I’m talking about the broader conversation that goes on when an event looms large in the public mind, and a business or organization joins that conversation.)

It opens a big hole in the traditional event-sponsorship business model. So how to adapt?

By doing pretty much exactly the opposite of what event governing bodies have generally done in the past, which was to clamp down and try to assert more control.

Organizations that gripe about others riding their conversational coattails need to become better – a lot better – at conversation themselves. Maybe that’s by creating content that’s worth talking about. And maybe it’s by becoming more open, transparent and willing to engage.

There’s some good conversational advice in the adage “If you want to be interesting, be interested”. A lot of the organizations complaining the loudest about “ambush” marketing haven’t seemed terribly interested in what their audiences have had to say. And that has to change.

In other words, bringing the most expensive cheese ball to the party doesn’t mean everyone there has to talk to you and only you. But it can be a great conversation opener… if you’re the social type.

(In a hurry? Spoiler: I found my solution at AppleToolbox.)

I’m always eager to jump on even the most minor of upgrades, which should probably go in my bring-forward file for my next bout of spiritual introspection. So I was one of those people obsessively checking for the iPhone operating system upgrade this morning – and clicking on the “Sure thing! Squirt that sucker straight into my phone!” button as soon as it appeared.

And all went as smoothly as advertised… until I tried tethering, and couldn’t. And then couldn’t check email. Or surf the web. It took me a while, but I realized I had no data connection.

Two of my Twitter friends, stv and drfyzziks, started me down the right path when they mentioned that Rogers had pushed out an update to their iPhone settings last night. I hadn’t seen it. And sure enough, iTunes kept trying to install that update on my phone – and kept failing.

A call to Rogers customer support revealed that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. But nearly an hour later, with plenty of switch-flipping on Rogers’ end and a few hard-resets and virtual handstands on mine, we were no closer to a data connection.

I soon learned that restoring factory settings would give me a 3G connection, but a blank phone; restoring all of my content from a backup would take the connection away again. Trying to change the Rogers settings was an exercise in frustration and futility.

Then a web search that confirmed this isn’t an isolated issue, and finally led me to AppleToolbox. They had the answer I needed: a site called Unlockit NZ.

This site does something really simple but very, very handy: it creates a new profile on your iPhone with a few custom settings. Most importantly, it tells your phone how to access the Internet using your mobile carrier. You visit the site on your iPhone (which means you need a WiFi connection) and navigate to the “Set custom APN” screen, where you select your carrier. (There are two options for Rogers; I chose the second.)

One confirmation screen later, I was surfing the web on 3G. (And, by the way, Rogers pushed an updated settings file to my phone. Go figure.)

I can’t promise this will work for you, but if not, you can easily remove the profile under iPhone Settings > General > Profile. Good luck!

One of the decisions that has made me the happiest has been to start publishing Noise to Signal without worrying too much about whether I was good enough to go toe to toe with the greats. My technique was good enough that it didn’t get in the way of the jokes, and the jokes were good enough that they made people laugh, so *click!* Published.

In the three years since then, I think I’ve improved steadily. Certainly I’ve become more confident, and today I’ll tackle visual ideas that would have scared the bejeezus out of me back in 2007. I’m using colour from time to time, I’m experimenting with light, and I’m having fun.

So I’ve learned to answer the “am I good enough?” voice with a “Yes.” (It’s no accident that the voice asks “Am I good enough?” and not “Is this cartoon good enough?” But that’s a subject for another blog post. Or a therapy session.)

I am good enough.

But I want to be better. I want to be really good. I want to be great.

According to a study cited in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, true greatness requires an investment of at least 10,000 hours.

I’m always suspicious of rules like this, but provided they’re taken with a fist-sized grain of salt, they can be a pretty useful spur to action. So with the 10,000-hour rule, we’re looking at the equivalent of 250 40-hour weeks… or five solid years of full-time activity. (I picture the point where you complete your 10,000th hour as kind of like levelling up in a good video game. I hope the cinematic is worth it.)

It’s hard to think of many areas where I’ve put in those kind of hours. Fretting: definitely. Social web: I must be getting close.

Cartooning: …Well, let’s find out.

Here are some very rough estimates from different periods in my life:

• Middle school: I started cartooning for the first time, spurred by a friend’s cartoons of a skateboarder who defeated evil teachers and vice-principals alike. But it was sporadic. Let’s say… 20 hours.
• Grade 9: I started to cartoon in earnest. (Here, too, a friend played a role – my only real cartooning buddy, who lived up Bearbrook Road from me. We shared a common conviction that the 2B pencil was the only worthy instrument for any true artist.) Even then, though, I probably averaged two hours a week. Call it… 100 hours.
• Grades 10-13: I cartooned every chance I had. Larry Kry, my physics teacher, gave me a Koh-i-Noor technical pen to encourage me (and used my cartoons in some of his lessons). I probably cartooned an hour or more a day, less during the summer holidays. Let’s say… five hours a week, over two hundred weeks. That’s… 1,000 hours.
• University: Probably the same pace, especially for the year I was running cartoons in the Carleton U student newspaper, The Charlatan. That’s six years… 1,500 hours.
• Journalism school: A lot less free time for that year. Say… 100 hours.
• Operation Dismantle: My first job out of university involved very little cartooning, although I did some on the side. Let’s call it… 100 hours.
• Parliament Hill: Three and a half years, some cartooning. Maybe an hour a week. To be conservative… 150 hours.
• Queen’s Park: One and a half years, virtually no cartooning. Seriously. Ditto my years in Victoria, and my freelance and NOW Communications years. Let’s be conservative and call it zero.
• Noise to Signal: Three years, starting slow and with some lulls along the way, probably averaging four hours a week. That’s… 600 hours.

The final total: just north of 3,500 hours.

Say I want to reach that 10,000-hour mark in the next three years. That’s about 2,150 hours per year… or more than a 40-hour work week, with no lunch breaks and no vacations. If I want to do that in the next decade, it’s 650 hours per year, or 13 hours a week. That sounds more likely. (So for everyone who’s planning on sticking with me and the cartoon through to 2020, good news: it’s going to be great.)

How about you? Have you hit the 10,000-hour mark on something you want to be great at?