There actually is a really strong community of mathematicians at mathoverflow.net. Also, I know quite a few academics who tweet about their research but these a

There actually is a really strong community of mathematicians at mathoverflow.net. Also, I know quite a few academics who tweet about their research but these are definitely the exception rather than the norm. A simple reason as to why academics aren't "socially connected" is that they don't need to be. The academic social network exists informally and is more tightly knit than a social network of say programmers, so I don't necessarily have to be your facebook friend or follow you on twitter to be able to get in touch with you through 2-3 hops As far as blogs are concerned, one reason to write blogs is for purely didactic purposes. I definitely know tons of Grad students who use to prepare their notes and put them on their web pages or local servers to fulfill that need. The other reason: To transmit your ideas to wider audience is much a more harder problem to solve. Mathematical abstractions get progressively harder to communicate if your understanding of the basics is weak, example, you would definitely need a background in vector spaces to understand functional analysis. I remember reading a blog recently where the author ( a machine learning academic) had written about his experience in implementing a stochastic gradient solver for online learning in Clojure: There were a couple of comments complaining that there was no context. While, I definitely see where those folks are coming from, it would take too long and a good deal more posts to be able to break down a couple of book's worth of ideas before you get to what you want to talk about.