Surfer magazine as published on Yahoo's Livestand tablet platform.

Yahoo is betting big that its days as the net’s dominant portal — the first stop for millions of web users looking for news and information around the web — will be resurrected by the popularity of tablet computers like the iPad.

Yahoo announced a new publishing platform for tablet computers Thursday. It’s called Livestand, and it features rich photos, hands-on interactivity, and personalization technology ported over from Yahoo’s front page.

To use Livestand, iPad or Android tablet users will visit the Livestand homepage and sign in with their Yahoo, Facebook or Google account info. Like Yahoo.com, the default page will include a mix of content from Yahoo, including its popular news, sports, finance and celebrity sites, as well as content from other media companies that also decide to publish on the platform, such as Surfer magazine.

Yahoo says it will personalize the mix based on topics you say you’re interested in, and then deeper refinements will come from the personalization technology that watches what you read. Yahoo currently uses that tech to make millions of individualized variations on its Yahoo.com homepage.

Nike Run magazine published in Yahoo's Livestand platform.

Yahoo thinks the platform, based on open HTML5 standards, will be easier, cheaper and more flexible for publishers than using custom app-creation tools, such as the ones used by Wired magazine and The Daily to create iPad apps.

Yahoo also thinks the platform could help solve online journalism’s revenue woes.

“We see tablets as a catalyst that will allow ad dollars to shift from TV and print to interactive,” Yahoo’s chief product officer Blake Irving told reporters and analysts in a call Thursday. “The tablet is something you can lean back on a couch with, and curl up with. So brands can finally match the intimacy that they had with magazines.”

Without naming names, Irving said Livestand’s deep integration with publication’s backend systems and its interactivity will trump currently hot iPad reading apps such as Flipboard, which create tablet “magazines” by monitoring links in Twitter and RSS feeds.

“RSS-like magazines deliver a shallow experience,” Irving said.

Irv Henderson, Yahoo’s vice president for mobile, described Livestand as “your digital newsstand that is continually programmed by your interests.”

“The more you use it, the better it gets,” he said.

Livestand isn’t live yet, though Yahoo says to expect it to be available in the first half of the year.

Yahoo is focusing first on featuring its own content, including its popular photo-sharing service Flickr, and with select partners. But Henderson emphasized that the product is considered the future of Yahoo and that they want it to be a platform open to any publication.

As for making money, Yahoo will be handling the ads and sharing the revenue with fellow publishers. The company declined to say what the revenue split would be. Also, the ability for publications to sell subscriptions wouldn’t be available at launch, though it will add that in the future.

Henderson says that using HTML5 will allow the site to combine the rich interactivity of tablet apps, with the power of the open web. That means that a reader can share a link to Livestand content with others, and that comments left on a story in Livestand that’s also on a publisher’s website could show up in both locations.

While the iPad may be the only device that Livestand works on at launch, Henderson says that the product should work on upcoming Android-powered tablets running the Honeycomb tablet OS. Yahoo will also be working to make the reading experience work on smaller tablets, smartphones and even on traditional PCs and televisions.

If Yahoo can pull that off, the company may have just found a way to remain relevant in the tech world, and have an answer for the always nagging question, “What exactly is Yahoo?”

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