Good shifting comes with good practice! It's not really necessary to get a perfect shift, but it will help reduce wear on your clutch (not really a concern anyway, as chances are you'll sell the bike before needing a new one), but it's immensenly satisfying to nail a perfect shift just right.
The two keys to butter-smooth shifting are preloading and rev matching. Preload the shifter by sticking your toe underneath the shifter and applying upward pressure, but not enough to force a shift. Then, in one smooth motion (this is where practice comes in), pull the clutch, roll off the throttle slightly to lower the revs (if you're upshifting; otherwise give it a blip to increase revs to match for a downshift), and change to the next gear. When it all comes together you'll have arrived at motorcycle nirvana, and start ripping through the gears like it's nobody's business.
On another note, when "cleaning" the carbon out of your cylinders, the trick is not necessarily the RPM's you're operating at, but the load on the engine. If you're maintaining speed in 1st gear at 30 mph, it's not doing anything for the engine other than making the pistons move up and down, because this require almost no work from the engine. Running the engine at full load, on the other hand, will build up enough heat to make spark plugs glow and burn off deposits. So don't be afraid to pop 'er in 3rd or 4th and do some WOT blasts down the street.
Looking at spark plugs can tell you so much about what's going on in an engine. While it's more cirtical to know about reading plugs in a carb'ed engine, for the sake of fine tuning, it can still tell you the same information about what's going in in a FI engine. Shame it's become such a lost art among the majority of plug-the-computer-in-see-what-it-tells-me "mechanics".
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