Since we had an existing list to work from, we used a couple of automated techniques to get the data into Joomla!

1. We scraped the Source website on the Joomla Wiki and extracted data for each website link into a csv file.  The website name, href link and category (country) were recorded for each entry.
2. Once we had this data, a script was written to parse the csv file and visit each site to take a screenshot in a set resolution. The only issues here were that some sites had been hacked and others were too slow to load, so we couldn't grab those.  The script then cropped all the images to the same size and renamed them appropriately. This automation took roughly 15 hours.
3. We then had to solve the issue of getting the data into Joomla, as we didn't want to enter 1750 articles manually.  We had decided to use k2 as the CCK with the Title, Country as a category, screenshot for the image, and extra fields for the gs location, and a few other details.  We decided against doing a csv import due to possible complications with the images, as they're not identified in the database but rather by a hashed filename.  We decided rather to automate the process of manually adding each article into the backend, this was a familiar process to us and k2 would then handle the images.  So we wrote a sript to add each k2 category (country) from the csv file and automatically set the correct inherit parameters etc.  We then did the same for saving out each item, setting the appropriate title, category, image and fields.  The script of commands to do all this was over 100k lines and had to be split into 10 pieces of 185 articles each.  Each batch of 185 articles took about 50minutes to run.
4. Once all the items were in we had to manually move them around on the map...
   
5. To increase the speed of the map (initially loading at 50 seconds) we introduced caching, this greatly improved performance. On top of this the css is combined and minified. The main Map file was reduced from 23.000 lines of code to 4 lines of code.

Note: In order to classify the countries we used wikipedia as a source to make 6 regions (Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, Central & South America, North America). There are some 'countries' classified into different 'regions' while they are part of others.