Alert the taskbar

I've been doing some of the tutorials over at kksou's site (fantastic, BTW. It should be required reading for anyone learning php-gtk).

I am building a small chat GUI to interact with one I did already in PHP with jQuery, and everything is going swimingly. But, I had a couple questions i was unable to find answers for and thought someone could help me.

Firstly, I would love to know how to "alert" the taskbar. That is, when the applicaiton is running and an even happens (like a new message comes in, for example) but the window does not currently have focus, how can I make the taskbar entry "blink"? I'm sure theres another word for it, but I'm not familiar with GTK at all so I just don't know. Basically, how can I alert the user something has happened using the entry in the taskbar.

Secondly, I did the tutorial at kksou's site for the GtkStatusIcon, and its fantastic! The chat also has a queue of users waiting to chat, and it would be great if I could pop a menu from the status icon from some event (like a new user comes in).

Any ideas would be appreciated (that or let me know its impossible right now and I guess I'll have to leave it at that)