Which would you rather have: A million-member email list or a network of 25,000 bloggers and 20,000 fundraisers? A look at Clinton vs Obama's metrics leads me to one answer: a network is more powerful than a list.

Ask any modern media strategist what the best metric to gauge success is for political candidates and you'll get a whole host of different answers. For example, some most people likely think money raised online is the most important indicator, while others point to success in places like YouTube and other socnets (social networks) and socuts (social utilities) or website traffic.

If you'd ask me, I think you have to look at the whole package to gauge success. That's likely why I'm digging the Spartan Internet Political Performance Index.

Summer's almost over. Do a cannonball in to the pool after the jump...

Todd Ziegler of the Bivings Group, who I greatly respect, recently dinged us (gently) with a post called "The Danger of Using YouTube Views as a Metric." He argued that our daily tracking of how many times each candidate's videos are viewed on YouTube was "deceptive" due to the "vastly different ways candidates are using YouTube." And he got me thinking, not just about YouTube views, but also about the importance of how many subscribers each candidate has garnered on YouTube.