Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I have been experimenting with Google’s NotebookLLM. I like is using it to remind me of what I have written in fifteen years of this blog.

I have been experimenting with Google’s NotebookLLM. I’m still not sure what NotebookLLM is or what it is intended to do. I guess there is value in experimenting before drawing conclusions.

One thing I have found useful is reminding me of what I have written. I have been writing this blog for about fifteen years. I fail to remember everything I have written. I fail to understand the themes of my writing. If a really smart person read all my blog posts, how would they describe me and my writings?

The NotebookLLM takes the place of that really smart person—well, sort of, maybe.

I downloaded all my blog posts (WordPress export to XML). I ran a utility program I wrote that strips enough of the XML away so that I have an HTML that I can read in a browser. I then paste all that into MS Word and save it as a PDF. This is all approximately good enough for this purpose.

I pushed the PDF of fifteen years of blog posts into NotebookLLM. I can “ask questions of” NotebookLLM based on these 1,600 blog posts. Viola’. There are answers.

Privacy? I am sending Google this great big PDF of blog posts. Well, I’ve already sent the whole world all these blog posts, so someone already has copies. Privacy is not an issue in this use case.

Perfection? Nope. This is, however, pretty good and good enough for this use at this time for me.