Create a sphere for example, assign a texture to it. Then go to the attributes of your material. You should now see a field that is labeled glow. Open it check the glow box, and there you go.
If you open the hypershade on a clean - empty scene you see three basic materials, lambert1, particle cloud and another one whose name I forgot. But when you open the atributes of this last one you get a lot of options concerning the glow, enabeling you to really tweak it and get the look you want.

I hope it helped