I am going to review, in the context of gauge theories, the anomalous dimension of twist two operators, the cusp anomaly of Wilson loops and how they relate through AdS/CFT to rotating strings in AdS space. Then I'm going to describe in more detail the spiky strings and their properties for large spin which allows us to obtain a relation between the anomalous dimension of twist two operators and the pp-wave anomaly, an anomaly we find when N=4 SYM theory is put in a pp-wave background. Finally I'm going to consider various new open string solutions describing Wilson loops in a pp-wave and in flat space. Based on 0802.2039 and 0804.3438.