Up the feed (or down it, whatever) comes an item from the Register which announces Moab maker Cluster Resources welcomes cloud fluffers — and I’m like, “…cloud fluffers?”

The press release – for such it turns out to be – makes no further mention of “cloud fluffers”, nor does it offer a meaning for the term. Is this an actual expression, in any kind of common usage?

Cluster Resources turn out to be a Load Balancing Act Writ Pretty Large, so I’m presuming that a cloud fluffer is intended to refer to a user of network computing, whose data populates, provides grist to the network. And makes it turgid, apparently (Well, would you make a transitive verb out of tumesce?).

At the time of this writing, “cloud fluffers” – Google Search gives 24 results (disregarding pages “very similar to these”), of which the first ten or so are versions of this same Moab headline turning up in aggregators. After that, things get a bit strange.

• The Battle of the Fluffy Clouds on Shitespace:
  

  One day, in the village of Ig, the parishioners were holding their annual Spleens Day festival which commemorated the day when the cloud fluffers of the neighbouring village of Frippit one night sneaked into Ig and coated the parson’s horse in fig syrup. In retalliation for this heinous prank the parishioners of Ig stormed Frippit, captured the cloud fluffers, ripped their spleens out and hung them out to dry on the Ig village square sundial. Due to the loss of their cloud fluffers, Frippit has had to make do with drab, boring, unfluffy clouds ever since.

  a whimsical coinage for a class of worker whose job it is to keep local clouds fluffy. This is Google’s second best suggestion, remember, looking beyond the PR spewage.

• A passing reference on a Texas teenager’s Xanga site:
  

  But Kristen and I said that we would still like to be friends…our plan is meet “..on the west side of God’s building”-Kristen. Then we are going to become Cloud Fluffers. lol I know it all sounds crazy…buts I think it would be nice to have somthing planned when I get there. haha.

  “Samantha” 2005

  which is from Samantha’s final post, as it ominously happens. Implies an occupation in paradise?

• 

  and check this, picked from the crawling animated gif chaos of another teen chatboard:

  Lucifer is such a handsome fellow and his people/critter skills are put to good use here at the Bridge! Lucifer acts as a Bridge guidance counselor. He helps all of the newbies to the bridge to discover what they are best at…..Flying instructors, heavenly choir leaders, cloud fluffers, guardian angels. Lucifer is very, very good at his job and is so well respected here at the Bridge.

  Navin R. Johnson-Davis of Eugene, OR, July 2008

  The Bridge spoken of here couldn’t be Stamford Bridge, venerable home of Chelsea Football club? Nah. Stupid idea. Except that if we follow the author link to the quoted post, we find the truly remarkable piece you see above, and the comment,

  “My new wings from Willow!!! Just in time for my wedding with Chelsea!”

  So, who knows?

• Next, from an Irish military board from September 2008, the gnomic
  

  METOC/HM = cloud fluffers

  METOC/HM turn out to be acronyms for Hydrography, Meteorology
  and Oceanography, and “cloud fluffers” in this case being a nickname for personnel in those areas.

• And then this anonymous comment to what might or might not be some kind of equine cosplay blog, and rather too sweetly to be altogether reassuring:
  

  Do you have tuck-in assistants and little cloud fluffers and settlers…? Do they get silver-wrapped yummies before light’s out?

  Here, we seem to be in a mom-speak version of that which is done to aerate a feather pillow. Which is maybe the ancestral meaning of fluffer, in the porn biz sense.

• There’s another throwaway “cloud fluffers lol” on a cloud photography board called Sky Porno — which makes me wonder how it is the phrase has only occured to them once, and never used it substantively.

…a-and, that’s it. No-one, it seems, except Cluster Resources, is using “cloud fluffers” in any remotely relevant sense. I’d be jumping around making noises about neologism, but I don’t think this one will play outside certain sections of the cloud computing biz. Interpreted as broadly as I did near the top of the post, almost any of us (all of us reading this, as you presumably are, from a networked display device) could be considered “cloud fluffers” — but who would identify themselves as such? As a mildly passive-aggressive, derisory term for one’s customer base, it’s not quite “couch potato”, but it’s heading that way…