Social services, when based on the best available evidence of what works, are more likely to lead to successful outcomes for the people using them. This is what the Iriss aims to champion with the development of its Evidence-informed Practice Portal and the Confidence Through Evidence Toolkit, launched in April 2010.

What better way to gain an insight into the current needs of social services other than to ask the service users and carers themselves? The Social Work Education Participation (SWEP) website aims to achieve this by giving a voice to service users and carers -people who are often isolated - on their experiences of, and perspectives on, social care.

Google, possibly the web search engine of choice for most people, is wonderfully efficient at unearthing useful information. But have you ever wondered if there might be something relevant away down there on page 100 of your results? For more effective and efficient searching it's worth looking at some of Google's more advanced features.

Dementia is emerging as a major public health issue with serious implications for social care in the future. According to a report from Alzheimer's Disease International, more than 35 million people worldwide will have dementia in 2010 and that number will nearly double every 20 years, to 65.7 million in 2030 and 115.4 million in 2050.

Getting it Right, Assessments for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Carers and Service Users is a new interactive online learning resource produced by IRISS in conjunction with MECOPP.

It introduces the issues affecting minority ethnic carers and service users with an emphasis on achieving cultural competence within individual practice.

Almost daily the broadcast and print media announce new evidence that, for example, doctors could spot autism earlier by observing how toddlers respond to cartoons or that there is a direct link between passive smoking and dementia. These reports seldom cite the source and, worse, often report the findings selectively or inaccurately.

The little orange icon below can make your life easier. You will see it all over the web and it means you can keep up to date without having to visit the website to see what's new. The icon denotes the existence of something called an RSS feed (sometimes called news feeds, web feeds, XML feeds or simply feeds). RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication but you don't have to worry about this. More important is what it does, which is to summarise and syndicate.

Social media - the collective term for services such as Facebook, Flickr and Delicious - allow us to gather, store and share knowledge, information and experience. Previously we reported on Steph Gray's social media test suite which he set up to measure the extent to which social media websites were being routinely blocked.