Filled with pictures of beautiful or unusual cloud formations from around the world, and featuring a cloud of the month, the site sets out to counter what it calls the fascism of blue-sky thinking.

“Clouds are for dreamers, and their contemplation benefits the soul,” www.cloudappreciationsociety.com says on its homepage. Yahoo!, the search engine, nominated the Cloud Appreciation Society site after finding that at one point last year it was receiving seven million visits a month.

It takes a poetic, aesthetic view of clouds rather than a meteorological one, and quotes John Ruskin on the sky: “Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity.”

The society’s manifesto says it was “founded on the belief that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them”. Gavin Pretor-Pinney founded the society last January and runs it from his home in West London. He has 1,800 paid-up members in 26 countries; for a joining fee of only £1.70 they receive a lapel badge and a certificate to frame and hang on the wall.

“It all started when I gave a talk at a literary festival about clouds, and thought it would be a good idea to start a cloud society. A few months later I put up the website to get an international audience, because it was the cheapest and easiest way of doing things, and it has grown from that.” Mr Pretor-Pinney, 37, co-founder of The Idler magazine, yesterday explained his enthusiasm for another form of idling. “I loved to look at clouds when I was young, and like all children saw pictures, shapes and faces in them. It seemed to me a pity that you lose that sense of wonder when you grow up.”

He regards clouds as nature’s poetry and is writing a book about them. “It’s hard to match their variety and drama, particularly in Britain where we have a constantly changing cloudscape. Too many people think that perfect weather is a cloudless blue sky, but good weather and cloudy weather are not necessarily in opposition to each other.”

Among the clouds on the site is Morning Glory, a meteorological phenomenon 600 miles long that rolls in from the sea to the coast of Queensland at certain times of the year. Glider pilots like to fly on top of it as though surfing a wave.The clouds of the month section includes a stunning halo caused by ice crystals in cirrostratus, waterspout funnels touching down from cumulonimbus, streaks of rain or ice tumbling from clouds but never reaching the ground, blood-red altostratus at sunset and puffy little cumulus on a summer day.

The king of clouds is regarded as cumulonimbus, a formation so tall that its head hits the stratosphere and forms an anvil shape.

Long before the internet Coleridge, whose head was often in the clouds or some other mind-enhancing vapour, got the picture in 1819:

“O! It is pleasant with a head of ease,/Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,/To make the shifting clouds be what you please.”

Users of Yahoo! are being invited to vote for last year’s top website from several categories. The clouds are up against Transport for London, named best travel website; the illusionist Derren Brown, best TV website; and the best innovative website, on which you can spill virtual coffee over the website that most annoys you.

But that, frankly, is clouding the picture.

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